Author: martinmercer

  • The Leadership You Shouldn’t Take With You

    The Leadership You Shouldn’t Take With You

    Experience is supposed to make leadership easier. The longer we lead, the more situations we encounter, the more patterns we recognise and the more evidence we accumulate about what works. Yet there is a contradiction hidden inside that experience: the more often something has worked for us, the easier it becomes to stop asking why it worked in the first place. An approach succeeds in one organisation, then another, perhaps even a third, and eventually it stops feeling like an approach at all. It becomes part of how we lead. We have seen the results, we have evidence and we have earned some confidence in our judgement. Then we move somewhere new, apply much the same thinking and discover that the response is completely different. The tempting conclusion is that the new organisation is the problem. Sometimes it might be. Organisations can become stale, established practices can cease to serve their purpose and people who have worked together for years can become just as attached to their assumptions as an incoming leader is to theirs. Being established does not make something right any more than being new makes something better. The harder leadership task is resisting either conclusion until we understand enough to make it responsibly. Experience should make us more capable, but it should also give us better questions rather than simply greater confidence in our old answers.

    Nobody enters a new organisation empty handed. We carry experience, habits, expectations and assumptions about what competent leadership looks like. Some are obvious to us, while others have become so normal that we no longer recognise them as choices. How much should a leader consult? How quickly should decisions be made? How visible should hierarchy be? How directly should people challenge one another? How much authority should individuals have? Work in one environment for long enough and our answers can stop looking contextual. They simply become how things are done. I have experienced this in surprisingly trivial ways. I remember moving somewhere and wondering where the free tea and coffee was because I had become accustomed to workplaces providing it. It is hardly a profound leadership problem, but that is precisely why I find the example useful. If we can absorb an expectation about something so insignificant without noticing, imagine how many assumptions we can absorb about leadership, authority and relationships. Looking back, I can see the same process in my own development. There was a time when I associated effective leadership much more strongly with having answers. Making a decision myself could feel like good leadership because I was not wasting everybody else’s time by involving them unnecessarily. There was also something reassuring about looking like a leader who knew what he was doing. I was not trying to exclude people; I genuinely thought I was being efficient.

    Experience has changed that view considerably, but the lesson has not been that consultation is always better. That would simply replace one unquestioned rule with another. I am much more interested now in asking which is more beneficial in a particular situation: making the decision myself or involving the people it might affect? Sometimes involvement brings information I do not have, exposes consequences I have not considered or creates greater understanding of what follows. At other times, involving people in a decision adds little beyond consuming their time. Leadership judgement sits in recognising the difference. That is one reason I have become increasingly wary of describing practices as simply good or bad leadership without understanding the circumstances around them. A practice can be effective without being universally effective, and a leader can learn the right lesson from an experience only to make the mistake of applying it in the wrong place.

    Moving between countries made these assumptions much more visible to me. I remember arriving in Germany after years of leading in very different environments and discovering fairly quickly that some ways of operating that had become normal to me did not fit the context I had entered. Working with the Works Council was part of that learning. I had not consciously decided to import a particular leadership philosophy; I had simply spent long enough elsewhere for certain behaviours to feel normal. The same behaviour can carry very different meanings in different environments. Decisiveness might reassure one group and feel unnecessarily controlling to another. Extensive consultation might demonstrate respect and inclusion in one context while another group experiences it as frustrating hesitation. Neither interpretation can be understood properly by examining the leader’s intention alone. Context also exists in layers. We sometimes talk about national or organisational culture as though a leader operates inside one neat set of expectations, when someone might simultaneously be working within the legal and social expectations of one country, the norms of a profession, the culture of an organisation, the established practices of a team and the expectations within individual relationships. Those layers do not necessarily point in the same direction. Understanding context therefore cannot mean simply learning how things are done somewhere and copying them. Some requirements are not negotiable, professional expectations may differ from wider social conventions, and an organisation can have established practices that genuinely need challenging. Understanding context is not the same as surrendering to it.

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    There is another version of the problem that I find particularly interesting: returning to somewhere we think we already understand. When I returned to Europe, I had been away for sixteen years. I am British and had worked in Europe before, so there was a danger in thinking I was returning to something familiar. Yet some of what I remembered about working and leading there was no longer the reality I encountered. When we enter somewhere obviously unfamiliar, we expect to learn. We observe carefully because we know there are things we do not understand. Familiarity can remove that instinct, even though contexts do not stand still while we are somewhere else. Professional expectations change, workplace relationships change and behaviours once considered completely ordinary may be interpreted differently years later. Even our memory of the old context may be unreliable because it was formed through one particular organisation or experience. My earlier European leadership experience, for example, had itself been shaped by a relatively top-down environment. What I remembered as familiar was therefore not only old; it had always been partial. The same problem exists without crossing national borders. People return to former organisations, move back into sectors they once knew or take responsibility for areas in which they once had expertise. Familiarity can give them a head start, but it can also convince them that the learning stage is unnecessary. Sometimes the context we are most confident we understand is precisely the one we need to rediscover.

    There is a danger, however, in placing all the responsibility for contextual humility on the incoming leader. Organisations carry their own suitcases. I have worked in and observed environments where people have been there for a very long time and things have become stale. “This is how we do things here” can be every bit as limiting as “This is how we did it in my last organisation.” Longevity provides knowledge, and people who have lived through an organisation’s history understand things that a newcomer cannot possibly know on arrival. Dismissing that experience would be foolish. But longevity can also normalise practices whose original purpose has disappeared. A system may have made perfect sense years ago, or a behaviour may have developed in response to circumstances that no longer exist. This creates a more useful conversation than simply telling new leaders to listen. The incoming leader brings outside experience but incomplete local understanding; the established organisation brings deep contextual knowledge but potentially entrenched assumptions. Neither side automatically owns the better answer. The more productive relationship is one in which experience and context are allowed to interrogate one another: the newcomer remains willing to ask what they might not yet be seeing, while the established organisation remains willing to ask whether something is being defended because it still works or simply because it is familiar.

    The distinction that has become increasingly important to me is between the principles behind my leadership and the practices through which I express them. I do not believe leaders need one fixed leadership style. People, circumstances and organisations differ, so what is needed from a leader changes. But that does not mean everything changes. The principles I try to lead through are to inspire, understand, trust, clarify, develop and improve. Those provide continuity for me, while how they appear in practice can vary considerably. A principle is something deeper that we believe leadership should protect, enable or achieve. A practice is one way of putting that principle into action. An assumption begins to emerge when a practice works so consistently in one context that we forget it was ever contextual. Consultation is a good example for me. Working in more participative environments made me much better at involving people, and I came to value consultation far more strongly, but I did not eventually conclude that every decision should be democratic. There are times when a leader needs to gather information, listen carefully, consider different perspectives and then make a decision. If I turned consultation into an absolute rule, I would risk making exactly the same mistake I had made before, just from the opposite direction. Adaptability therefore need not mean inconsistency. A leader can remain consistent about what they are trying to achieve while being flexible about how they achieve it. The more useful question may not be, “What is my leadership style?” but, “What do I stand for, and what does leading according to those principles require here?”

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    A striking example of what can happen when successful experience travels without enough contextual challenge is Ron Johnson’s move from Apple to J.C. Penney. Johnson arrived in 2011 with an exceptional retail reputation, having previously worked at Target and helped develop Apple’s highly successful retail operation. J.C. Penney had genuine reasons to pursue change, which is important: this was not a healthy organisation being disrupted merely for the sake of an executive’s ego. Yet Johnson pursued a dramatic transformation that included abandoning the coupons and continual discounting familiar to many J.C. Penney customers, while introducing major changes quickly and with limited testing. Harvard Business School later examined how Johnson’s experiences at Target and Apple shaped the strategies he introduced at J.C. Penney, while Harvard Business Review criticised the assumption that practices associated with a Silicon Valley and Apple context could simply transfer to a retailer serving very different customers.

    It would be simplistic to say that Johnson failed because he copied Apple, just as it would be simplistic to attribute the fortunes of an organisation of that size to one person or one decision. The more useful lesson is about confidence and context. Contemporary accounts reported that when testing aspects of the new approach was suggested, Johnson referred to not testing at Apple; he later acknowledged underestimating how much J.C. Penney’s core customers valued coupons. The transformation was followed by a severe deterioration in sales, and Johnson left after approximately seventeen months. What makes the case valuable is not that an experienced leader tried to change an organisation and got it wrong. Leaders are sometimes recruited precisely because an organisation needs to change. It is that previous success can provide both the confidence necessary to challenge an established context and the confidence to underestimate how much that context needs to be understood first. The methods associated with our greatest successes may therefore deserve more scrutiny when we move, not less.

    That risk becomes more consequential as leaders become more senior. The more authority a leader has, the greater their ability to turn an assumption into organisational practice. At the same time, people may become less willing to challenge them, particularly when the leader arrives with a formidable reputation. The person with the greatest power to import an approach may therefore also be the person least likely to hear that what worked elsewhere may not belong here. There is a responsibility on organisations to create enough openness for that challenge to happen, but there is an equal responsibility on senior leaders not merely to say they welcome challenge but to behave in ways that make challenging them realistic. For me, that includes being transparent when I do not know something. I have sometimes wondered whether I am too honest about situations, but I have little appetite for a version of leadership where uncertainty has to be disguised as authority. If I genuinely do not know an answer, I would rather say so than perform certainty. Imagine an organisation where people could routinely say what they know, what they do not know and what they genuinely think without constantly calculating the politics of doing so. There is considerable power in that simplicity, particularly when a leader is new enough to the context that pretending to understand everything would be absurd.

    There is, though, an obvious danger in taking adaptability too far. If leadership should respond to context, does that mean a good leader should be capable of adapting to almost any organisational culture? I do not think so. At some point, adaptability meets personal values. I have seen or heard about environments characterised by behaviours I would find extremely difficult to work within: cliques, conversations behind closed doors, destructive organisational politics and people feeling as though they are constantly treading on eggshells. I have very little appetite for working that way. Yet there is an important qualification. My interpretation is still an interpretation. What I might describe as cliquey, somebody else might experience as a close-knit community; behaviour I regard as unhealthy organisational politics might be interpreted differently by somebody else. Contextual humility requires me to acknowledge that my judgement does not become objectively correct simply because I feel strongly about it, but that does not require me to abandon the judgement either. Every leader has boundaries, whether they articulate them explicitly or not. There will be behaviours we are willing to adapt, practices we are willing to reconsider and compromises that are simply part of working with other human beings. There may also be a point beyond which adaptation begins to mean becoming somebody we do not want to be. Understanding the context properly helps us distinguish between the two.

    My instinct in an environment I believed was unhealthy would probably be to try to influence it. We see something that concerns us and believe we might be able to improve it, and sometimes we can. But no individual is bigger than an organisation. There may come a point when we understand the environment, have tried appropriately to influence it and recognise that meaningful change is unlikely. If remaining then requires us continually to behave in ways that conflict with our values, leaving may be a more honest decision than learning how to survive it. This is not an argument for walking away whenever an organisation makes us uncomfortable. Leadership inevitably involves compromise, disagreement and working alongside people whose views differ from our own, and our personal preferences do not provide the objective definition of a healthy organisation. The question becomes more serious when the conflict is sustained and fundamental. At that point, asking whether we can succeed in the organisation may not be enough. We may also need to ask what succeeding there would require us to become.

    Ideally, some of this thinking begins before we enter the organisation at all. We are usually quite good at noticing the newcomer who repeatedly says, “In my last organisation, we did it this way.” It can become irritating remarkably quickly. Yet leaders can import exactly the same attitude without ever speaking those words. If I were considering a significant leadership role now, I would want to understand far more about the environment before deciding whether to enter it. I would walk around if I could, observe how people interact, seek genuine conversations rather than relying entirely on formal interview exchanges, ask my own questions of HR and listen carefully to the language people use when describing the organisation. An interview is not only about whether an organisation wants you; you are making a decision about them as well. That matters particularly when the commitment extends beyond changing jobs. Moving country, relocating a family or making another significant personal investment increases the consequences of discovering too late that the context is fundamentally wrong for you. None of this guarantees foresight. Organisations cannot reveal themselves completely during recruitment, and candidates cannot anticipate every difficulty. I know that if I found myself somewhere fundamentally incompatible with my values, part of my reaction would probably be to wonder how I had failed to see it beforehand. The objective is not to eliminate uncertainty but to approach opportunity with more curiosity. If I could give my younger self one warning, it would not be to avoid unfamiliar environments; working across very different contexts has taught me an enormous amount. It would be not to take an opportunity simply because it is there if accepting it requires you to bend or break the morals and values that matter to you. A bigger role is not automatically a better fit.

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    Perhaps this leaves experienced leaders with a more demanding set of questions than a simple instruction to adapt. What do I genuinely know about this environment, and what am I assuming? Which parts of my judgement are supported by evidence, and which simply feel obvious because of where I have worked before? What is genuinely ineffective here, and what is merely different from my preference? Which parts of my approach express principles I want to retain, which are practices that worked because particular conditions existed, and which have been repeated for so long that I have stopped recognising them as choices? The questions also need to work in the other direction. What might this organisation be taking for granted? Where could an outside perspective genuinely help? What deserves challenging rather than accommodating? Finally, there are the questions we perhaps ask too late: where are my boundaries, what am I willing to adapt, what am I unwilling to normalise, am I right for this environment, and is this environment right for me? There will rarely be neat answers, because contextual leadership is an exercise in judgement rather than a formula for getting every decision right. We should carry our experience with us; starting again from nothing every time we change context would waste much of what leadership experience gives us. But perhaps mature leadership means becoming more willing to unpack that experience before assuming everything in the suitcase still belongs in the room. Some things will deserve to stay exactly where they are, some will need adapting, some assumptions may have outlived the context that created them, and occasionally understanding the environment properly may lead us to a more uncomfortable conclusion about whether we belong there at all. Experience should make us more capable. Perhaps one of the clearest signs that it has is not the confidence with which we carry our old answers, but the quality of the questions we are still willing to ask.

    If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.

  • When Being Right Isn’t Enough

    When Being Right Isn’t Enough

    What I’m about to share includes some examples that embarrass me. I’d much rather be able to tell you that they all belong to my earliest years in leadership, when I was inexperienced and still finding my way. They don’t. Some happened when I’d been leading for years and should have known better. I’ve raised my voice when I shouldn’t have. I’ve allowed frustration with someone to affect the way I spoke to them. I’ve been so convinced that I was right about the issue that I failed to notice that I was wrong in the way I was handling it. I can’t change those moments, and I’m certainly not presenting myself as someone who now gets every difficult conversation right. But some of the leadership mistakes that embarrass me most are also the ones I remember most clearly. They’ve probably taught me more about how I want to use authority than the conversations I handled perfectly well.

    Because being right can be dangerous in leadership. Not being right itself, obviously, but what we sometimes allow ourselves to do once we’re convinced that we are. Someone has ignored an instruction. They’ve made a serious mistake. They’ve behaved irresponsibly or failed to meet an expectation you thought was perfectly clear. Suddenly a sharper tone feels justified. An interruption feels acceptable because you already know the answer. A raised voice becomes firmness. A public correction becomes accountability. We become so focused on what the other person has done wrong that we stop noticing what we’re doing.

    I had already seen what that could look like from the other side. Early in my career, I worked for a leader whose relationship with authority left a lasting impression on me, largely because I decided I wanted to lead differently. I can still remember being called in after appearing on a national television game show. While I was speaking to the host, I’d used the word “gobsmacked”. On my return to work, what I initially thought might be a friendly conversation about the experience became a severe reprimand about that one word and the supposed embarrassment it had caused the organisation. There had been no complaints. People who’d seen the programme were simply interested in what had happened. But the issue itself is almost beside the point. A leader was entitled to raise a concern if they genuinely had one. What stayed with me was the disproportion between the concern and the way authority was used to express it. There were other moments. On one occasion I left a meeting abruptly because an urgent situation had developed nearby and needed immediate attention. Afterwards, the discussion wasn’t primarily about what had happened or why I’d responded. I was reprimanded for leaving without first asking permission. I was still relatively junior, and the message was unmistakable: whatever the circumstances, I was expected to remember where the power sat. Experiences like that can teach you a great deal about leadership, although not always in the way the leader intends. I remember thinking that I wanted to do the opposite. The uncomfortable part is that knowing what poor leadership feels like doesn’t make us immune from practising it ourselves.

    One incident from much later in my career still makes me uncomfortable. A clear decision had been made for a legitimate reason and communicated to a family. Later, the family arrived anyway with their young child, and a colleague allowed them to proceed. I was furious. I challenged the colleague there and then, in a public space, raising my voice in front of other people. I was the senior leader, physically larger, and visibly angry. The underlying decision hadn’t suddenly become unreasonable. I still believed it shouldn’t have been overridden. But I’d allowed the fact that I was right about the issue to become permission to be wrong in the way I handled it. I apologised soon afterwards. And as we talked, I also acknowledged the difficult position the family had put her in. They’d already been told no, but they’d arrived anyway with an excited young child. In that moment, she’d been left to decide whether to turn them away at the door. That didn’t mean I agreed with what she chose to do. It did mean I could understand more clearly how she’d ended up there. There were apologies on both sides, but the part that stayed with me was mine.

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    That may be one of the more dangerous moments in leadership: when being right starts to feel like a licence. Certainty can make self-examination seem unnecessary. Yet two things can be true at once. The other person can be wrong, and I can still handle their wrongdoing badly. I can maintain the decision, insist on the standard and apply an appropriate consequence while also acknowledging that my tone, timing, setting or behaviour fell below the standard I expect of myself. I learnt that lesson another time after reacting angrily to a potentially serious accident involving several colleagues. A child had picked up a large piece of wood and was trying to hit other children with it, only a metre or two away from where several adults were sitting. The situation could have ended with someone being seriously injured. There was a genuine issue to address, but one response frustrated me enormously: in effect, “I was on my lunch break.” I found that inexcusable. The incident was unfolding almost directly in front of them, and the idea that being on a break removed any responsibility to respond pushed one of my buttons very hard. I got angry and challenged the colleagues publicly. Looking back, the better sequence seems obvious: deal with the immediate risk, allow the emotion to settle, then address the conduct privately. Explain what happened. Ask the person to help you understand what they saw and why they responded as they did. Be clear about the seriousness. None of that requires pretending the issue was less important. It simply refuses to make legitimate anger an excuse for handling accountability badly.

    That last point is harder than it sounds. It’s relatively easy to remain measured when someone immediately accepts your criticism. The greater test comes when they defend themselves, dispute your interpretation or refuse to offer the apology you think is due. If our respect disappears at precisely the moment another person stops complying, it was never much of a standard. It was a reward for making the conversation easy for us. Leadership sometimes requires us to narrow the discussion, become more direct or make clear that an issue cannot continue. “We’ve discussed this before. I don’t want us to be having this conversation again” can be a very firm message. Firmness, however, is carried by clarity and consequence. It doesn’t need extra volume.

    Over time, I began preparing much more carefully for difficult conversations. I think about the words I want to use, the order in which things need to be said and what could reasonably be misunderstood. That preparation hasn’t made the conversations more artificial. Oddly, it’s made me more relaxed. When I know what I need to communicate, I’m less likely to stumble into an unintended phrase, introduce something important as an afterthought or allow frustration to write the message for me. Preparation also gives me room to listen. If someone paraphrases what they believe they’ve heard and I realise it isn’t what I meant, that’s useful information. Intent matters, but it doesn’t erase impact. A leader’s job isn’t finished merely because the words sounded clear inside the leader’s own head.

    Sometimes preparation means designing safeguards around ourselves. I once had to be present in a formal conversation with someone who, I knew, was repeatedly saying things that were untrue. Dishonesty is one of the behaviours I find hardest to tolerate. Before the meeting, roles were agreed and I knew my job was to witness rather than conduct the conversation. So I sat there and listened, even when every instinct in me wanted to interrupt. Eventually the evidence was presented and the situation changed. Afterwards, the person asked to speak with me and apologised. I accepted the apology and explained how I felt about what had happened. The relationship didn’t magically become what it had been before, but the conversation remained calm. I don’t tell that story as evidence of exceptional self-control. The structure helped me. That’s the point. Good leadership doesn’t always mean trusting ourselves to behave perfectly under pressure. Sometimes it means knowing ourselves well enough to put guardrails in place.

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    There’s another dimension to those choices: the experience of the person with less power. There can be very good reasons to have another colleague, HR representative or witness present in a difficult meeting. Policy, fairness and protection matter. But the configuration of the room also communicates something. What feels like sensible protection to the leader can feel like being outnumbered to the person walking in. The setting, the invitation, who is present, where people sit and the first sentence can all influence whether someone experiences a conversation as an opportunity to explain or a judgement that has already been reached. Procedure shouldn’t be abandoned for comfort, but neither should we assume that procedure is psychologically neutral. I know what it’s like to walk into a meeting already expecting to be dismantled. In one role, after returning from two weeks of significant illness, I was called into a conversation about work that hadn’t been completed while I was away. What followed was a two-hour dressing-down about my reliability. Two hours. The detail I remember most clearly isn’t any individual criticism. It’s the feeling before the conversation properly began: I knew what kind of meeting I’d entered. There had been no meaningful check-in first, no attempt to understand before judgement arrived. That experience influenced a phrase I later came to use frequently in difficult conversations: “Help me understand.” Those words don’t remove accountability. They simply acknowledge the possibility that the leader may not yet possess the whole story.

    Power makes that humility more important, not less. When we’re the most senior person in the room, silence can be dangerously easy to misread. Someone may nod because they agree with us. They may also nod because challenging us feels unsafe. They may leave a conversation looking composed and tell colleagues afterwards that they felt humiliated. They may comply with the immediate instruction while becoming much less willing to bring us bad news in future. This is why intimidation is such a poor substitute for authority. Even when it appears to produce the desired result, we don’t know what else it has taught. A leader can win the conversation and lose access to the truth.

    People also learn from conversations that aren’t about them. I’ve watched a senior leader refer dismissively to a member of their own team across a room, reducing a colleague to “him” rather than using his name. It was a tiny choice of language, but power magnifies small behaviours. Everyone else in the room receives information from them. They learn who is afforded dignity, how mistakes are discussed and what might happen if they become the person who disappoints the leader next time. We often talk about culture as though it’s built through values statements and deliberate initiatives. A great deal of culture is built more quietly, through what people observe when someone with authority is irritated. This is also why charm shouldn’t be confused with respect. I’ve known leaders who could be warm, funny and exceptionally personable with clients or senior figures, then speak contemptuously about colleagues in private. Courtesy that rises and falls according to status isn’t really courtesy. It’s social calculation. If I had to choose one situation in which to judge the quality of a leader, I’d learn far more from watching how they speak to someone with less power who has disappointed them than from watching how they behave around the most powerful person in the room. People are often very good at managing upwards. Character becomes more visible when there’s little advantage in being gracious.

    My own standard for this was shaped long before I held a leadership title. My father cared deeply about basic manners. Please. Thank you. Listen properly. He had little sayings that stayed with me, and one principle underneath many of them was that manners cost nothing. I still notice something as ordinary as how people behave at a door: whether they look behind them, notice the person approaching and hold it for a moment, or simply walk through as though nobody else exists. Holding a door open doesn’t make someone a good leader. But the instinct behind it interests me. Do you register the other person when there’s nothing in it for you? And does that instinct survive when you’re irritated, under pressure or holding more power than they do?

    That’s where the idea of the person in the corner came from. Before a difficult conversation, I sometimes imagine someone I deeply respect sitting quietly in the room. For me, that person might be my father. Not because I need to impress him, and certainly not because I imagine he would expect me to avoid difficult messages. He represents a standard I would want my behaviour to withstand. Would I still be comfortable with the way I was speaking if he could hear the tone? Would I point, interrupt or use my physical presence differently? Would I be able to explain afterwards not only what decision I made, but how I treated the person while making it? The imagined observer isn’t there to make leadership softer. It’s there to make authority more conscious.

    There’s a danger in taking that idea too far. Leadership can’t mean living permanently for an audience. I’ve held roles in which I became increasingly conscious that behaviour outside formal work could also be interpreted through the position I held. I became more selective about socialising with colleagues and more protective of boundaries. There’s a cost when self-awareness becomes constant self-surveillance. The goal can’t be immaculate behaviour twenty-four hours a day. Apart from being unrealistic, it would contradict another lesson I’ve had to learn: leaders get things wrong. The standard isn’t perfection. The standard is accountability. I was reminded of that in a difficult conversation when the other person became frustrated and I could feel myself following them. I began interrupting. My tone changed. Then I heard myself. I stopped the conversation and acknowledged that I was becoming emotional and wasn’t behaving in a way I considered professional. I apologised. The other person initially tried to reassure me that it was fine, but I didn’t want the apology diluted simply because they were being gracious. It wasn’t fine. I could own that without changing the decision we were discussing. The substantive position remained exactly where it had been. What changed was the temperature. We began listening again.

    That experience altered the way I think about apologies from leaders. An apology is sometimes treated as a surrender of authority, as though acknowledging poor behaviour weakens the legitimacy of everything else we’ve said. It needn’t. There’s an important difference between apologising for the decision and apologising for how you conducted yourself while discussing it. “I was wrong to speak to you like that” doesn’t automatically mean “I was wrong to hold you accountable.” In fact, refusing to acknowledge the first because we’re convinced of the second is another way that power protects itself. The ability to correct ourselves in the room may be one of the clearest signs that we no longer need to perform authority.

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    Looking back, I think that was the biggest change in my own leadership. Early on, I sometimes felt I had to demonstrate that I was doing the job: noticing things, commenting on them, making my authority visible. Eventually I realised I didn’t need to keep proving why I was the leader. I needed to concentrate on doing the work. That didn’t make difficult conversations disappear. It didn’t make me endlessly patient, and it certainly didn’t make me incapable of getting things wrong. What changed was the burden I placed on authority. I no longer needed volume, constant oversight or the last word to reassure me that the position was mine. If anything, greater responsibility made the standard for my own behaviour higher. The more power I had in a conversation, the less comfortable I became with using that power carelessly.

    Perhaps that’s the more useful way to think about leadership standards. They aren’t demonstrated when the conversation is easy, the other person agrees with us and everybody leaves happy. They become visible when we’re frustrated, when the evidence seems entirely on our side, when someone challenges our version of events, or when we could behave badly and probably get away with it. Courtesy is easy when it costs nothing emotionally. Respect becomes meaningful when we have to choose it while still saying no, setting a boundary, applying a consequence or admitting that our own behaviour has fallen short.

    The person in the corner is only a device. Eventually, the hope is that we don’t need anyone there at all. Not a boss, not an audience, not a colleague waiting to challenge us. We know the standard we want to meet, and we hold ourselves to it because authority has made that responsibility greater, not smaller. And when we fail, as we sometimes will, we notice, we own it and we repair what we can. The question isn’t whether people can tell that we’re the leader. They usually can. The more revealing question is what they learn about us when we no longer need to prove it.

    If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.

  • What 200 Leadership Conversations Taught Me

    What 200 Leadership Conversations Taught Me

    Two hundred leadership videos sounds, on the surface, like the sort of milestone that ought to come with a conclusion. After that many conversations, perhaps I should have a firmer set of answers, a more settled philosophy, a neat collection of principles I can point to and say: this is what leadership is. I do not. What I do have is greater clarity about my own thinking, a much larger collection of experiences to draw upon, and an even stronger sense that leadership rarely gives us the comfort of a clean answer. That is not something I discovered at video 200. I think I have always believed it. But there is a difference between believing that leadership contains grey areas and repeatedly trying to explain what you would actually do inside them. Once you start putting your thinking into words, the grey becomes much harder to ignore.

    That has probably been one of the unexpected benefits of The Quiet Leader HQ for me. When I began, I was thinking about making videos. I was not imagining a website, journal articles, podcasts, tools, book recommendations or the wider collection of material that has gradually grown around them. More importantly, I was not imagining the amount of reflection the process itself would create. When you are working full-time in leadership, reflection is often something you know you should make time for rather than something you genuinely have enough time to do. There is always another decision, conversation, meeting or problem waiting. Having more headspace now has allowed me to stop and examine ideas that, in the middle of working life, I might simply have acted upon. Trying to explain those ideas has been revealing. There have been plenty of occasions when an apparently straightforward question has led to several more because my first answer did not quite hold together. Sometimes two things I believe appear contradictory. Sometimes the honest answer is simply, “It depends.” Timing changes things. Context changes things. The people involved change things. Two situations can look remarkably similar from a distance and still require different responses.

    That can sound like an unsatisfactory view of leadership. If everything depends on circumstances, what stops a leader using context as an excuse for inconsistency? What stops “it depends” becoming a convenient way of avoiding a clear position? I do not think uncertainty removes the responsibility to decide. Leaders still have to make judgements, often before they possess every piece of information they would ideally like. Experience helps. Not because experienced leaders are automatically better leaders, and certainly not because time served makes somebody right, but because experience gives us more patterns to recognise. The more situations we encounter, the more reference points we have when something familiar begins to emerge. Training can prepare us. Other people can advise us. Previous experience can arm us. But until we encounter a particular situation for the first time, there will always be something we do not know. Perhaps experience, at its best, does something else as well: it teaches us to be a little less impressed by our own certainty.

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    One of the leadership mistakes I regret most began with an assumption about a colleague. I had heard from one source that this person was not particularly committed to the organisation, with their absence being offered as part of the evidence. I accepted too much of that interpretation. Worse, I allowed it to influence what I said to the person. The judgement was wrong. They were committed, and they were a very good colleague. Over time, I came to recognise that my original assessment had been mistaken. What I did not understand was the effect my words had had. I only discovered that nearly four years later. There is something uncomfortable about realising that a moment you barely remember has remained significant to somebody else. I had revised my judgement internally, but that did not undo the original conversation. From my perspective, the thinking had moved on. From theirs, something I had said had affected our relationship in a way I had not even recognised. I apologised, because an apology was due. But hindsight does not offer us the luxury of returning to the moment and handling it properly the first time.

    The lesson I take from that now is not that leaders should ignore what they are told about people. Handover matters. Context matters. If you inherit responsibility for a team, you should listen to those who know the organisation and understand what has happened before you arrived. But somebody else’s judgement of a person should not automatically become yours. Meet people. Spend time with them. Listen. Give yourself enough space to form your own view before turning an inherited interpretation into a conclusion. If something later needs to be formalised, formalise it. But do not confuse receiving information with knowing somebody. That experience also changed the way I think about reflection itself. We speak about reflective leadership as though reflection is inherently virtuous. I am not sure it is. Plenty of people can reflect. The more important question is whether reflection changes anything.

    You can recognise privately that a decision was poor and continue behaving exactly as before. You can understand that your words affected somebody and decide that admitting it would make you look weak. You can analyse your leadership endlessly without altering a single action. At that point, reflection risks becoming little more than self-observation. For me, the meaningful part comes afterwards. Do you change the behaviour? Do you reconsider the decision? Do you seek another perspective? Do you go back to somebody? Can you apologise? Some leaders find that last part particularly difficult. There is still an idea in leadership that admitting you were wrong somehow weakens your authority. I think that is wrong. But the opposite can become performative too. A leader who constantly announces uncertainty, reverses every decision or apologises for everything is not demonstrating thoughtful humility. People need leaders who can make decisions and stand behind them. The challenge is not to become so attached to being right that changing your mind feels like defeat.

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    There is a difficult balance here. Good judgement requires enough confidence to act and enough humility to reconsider. Sometimes disagreement should not move you at all. Leadership inevitably involves decisions that somebody will dislike. At other times, something does not sit right. Your experience, instinct or the response around you tells you that you need to think again. There is not always a neat framework waiting to tell you which situation you are in. Sometimes you simply have to stop and seriously consider whether you have got it wrong. That may sound less reassuring than a list of leadership rules, but after two hundred videos I find it more useful. The purpose of experience is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to help us navigate uncertainty with a larger set of reference points, while remaining alert to the possibility that this situation is not quite the same as the last one.

    The same is true of the conversations behind these videos and articles. Having my thinking questioned has helped me consolidate it. I am more confident in many of my views than I was because I have had to articulate why I hold them. But confidence born from reflection feels different from certainty left unexamined. One has been tested. The other has simply gone unchallenged. None of that means I now regard my earlier leadership through a catalogue of regrets. I think I have been a good leader. I have made good decisions, and I have made some terrible ones. Both belong to the same career. Pretending otherwise would make reflection fairly pointless. The value is in being able to look at a mistake without allowing it to become either a defence of what happened or a verdict on everything else you have done.

    Perhaps that is why video 200 did not feel like the right moment for another leadership lesson. The original video was simply a thank you. If somebody has watched one video, shared something, disagreed with an idea, stopped to think, used one of the resources or privately contacted me to say that something helped, then they have become part of what this project has turned into. Those messages matter to me precisely because The Quiet Leader HQ was never intended to be a place where one person announces the correct answers to leadership. In fact, the audience has given something back. When somebody says an idea helped them think differently, the natural response is thank you in return. They have given the work a purpose beyond producing the next piece of content. They have also helped create the conversation that keeps the thinking moving.

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    When I made the first video, I did not envisage any of this. I was simply making videos. Two hundred later, the project is broader, but the more significant difference may be the space it has created to think: to take an idea that might once have passed through my head during a busy working day and stay with it long enough to discover where it becomes uncomfortable; to notice the contradiction; to ask another question; occasionally, to admit that an answer I have given does not survive examination. That seems a more worthwhile milestone than the number itself. If I ever reach video 1,000, I hope I will have more answers. Experience should teach us something. Reflection should sharpen our judgement. We should be able to look back and recognise decisions we would now make differently. But I hope I have better questions too.

    Perhaps progress in leadership is not reaching the point where fewer things make us uncertain. Perhaps it is becoming better at recognising what we do not yet understand, knowing when experience deserves our trust, knowing when certainty deserves our suspicion, and asking the question that allows us to see the situation differently. Two hundred conversations in, I am increasingly convinced that having an answer matters. Knowing when to question it may matter more.

    If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.

  • When What Works Stops Working

    When What Works Stops Working

    For nearly eighteen years, a scheduling system I built in Excel continued to do its job. When I first created it, there was no suitable programme available to us, so I made one. At the time, people thought it was excellent. It solved a genuine problem, gave the organisation something it had not had before and, importantly, worked. When I moved on, I handed it to my successor. She continued to use it. Later, it passed to her successor. Elements of it are still being used today. There is a small part of me that looks at that and thinks: not bad. I made something useful enough to survive three leaders and the better part of two decades. There is another part of me that thinks: what on earth are we still doing using Excel for this?

    Both reactions are true, and I suspect the tension between them matters. Leaders quite rightly want to build things that last. We talk about sustainable systems, institutional memory and leaving an organisation stronger than we found it. Yet longevity can flatter us. Something surviving for years can feel like proof that we got it right, when sometimes it only proves that nobody has seriously asked whether it is still right. The scheduling system continued to perform its basic function for a long time because the organisation itself did not change very much. Once the demands placed upon it began changing more frequently, its limitations became increasingly obvious. It had not suddenly become badly designed. The organisation had simply moved beyond the problem it had originally been designed to solve.

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    That experience has made me wary of one of the easiest questions in leadership: does it work? Most things work, at least at some level. A meeting can work because everybody eventually leaves knowing what has been decided. A reporting process can work because a report appears at the end of it. A tradition can work because the event takes place every year. An old spreadsheet can work because it still produces the information people need. The harder questions are whether it works effectively, whether the value justifies the time and effort it consumes, whether it can adapt, whether it remains sustainable and, perhaps most importantly, whether it is still having the impact we think it is having. A process can be functional long after it has stopped being particularly valuable.

    I saw something similar when I returned to an organisation after being away for many, many years. I had helped establish an annual community celebration. When it was new, it felt fresh and successful. When I returned thirteen or fourteen years later, much of the same approach was still there. Again, I had two reactions. A tiny part of me was pleased that something I had helped create had lasted. A much larger part was wondering why it had barely changed. People knew what was coming. They knew how the event would unfold and what would happen next. It still worked. People participated. But its impact had diminished because familiarity had taken away much of what had once made it engaging.

    The uncomfortable question is whether I would have noticed that if I had never left. I would like to think I would. I am not convinced. That was my first organisation, and early in my career I probably saw much of what happened there as the natural way organisations worked. After working on two different continents, in very different settings, I came back with other reference points. I could see things I might once have accepted without noticing. Distance had given me fresh eyes. Had I stayed continuously, I might instead have refined the event, defended it and become increasingly skilled at maintaining something whose original impact was quietly fading.

    This is one of the less comfortable consequences of experience. Experience can sharpen judgement, but familiarity can dull it. The longer we remain close to a system, tradition or organisation, the easier it becomes to confuse what is normal with what is necessary. We learn the reasons things are done. We understand the history. We know which compromises were made and why. All of that knowledge is valuable, but it can also make established practice remarkably difficult to see clearly. A newcomer may ask, “Why do you do it like that?” and the experienced leader can provide a perfectly coherent answer. The existence of an answer, however, does not mean the practice still deserves to exist.

    I have seen the same tendency in myself in much smaller ways. Earlier in my career, I would send several emails about one subject, then follow them up in a meeting and expect everyone to know where we were. When people arrived without the information I thought they should have, it was tempting to see a preparation problem. Eventually I had to recognise that I had helped create the problem. The information might have been there, but it was scattered across messages and not always presented in a way that made the important action obvious. At times I was more concerned with how an email looked than with whether the person receiving it could use it effectively.

    My response over time has been to move towards one comprehensive email: one central point of record containing what people need to know. That does not please everybody either. Some people find a long email overwhelming. There is no communication system that perfectly matches every individual’s preference. The lesson for me has therefore not been to discover the perfect email. It has been to make the way I communicate predictable enough that people know how to work with it, while remaining willing to question whether my preferred structure is actually helping the audience. Consistency has value, but consistency should not become an excuse for designing everything around the leader.

    That distinction changes how I think about accountability. If one person repeatedly arrives at a meeting without completing reasonable preparation, I may need to have an accountability conversation with that person. If half the room arrives unprepared, I need to resist the satisfaction of concluding that half the room has suddenly become irresponsible. I should first look at the conditions I have created. Was the preparation reasonable? Was its purpose clear? Could people find what they needed? Did they understand what was expected of them? A pattern does not automatically prove that the system is wrong, but it should make the system part of the investigation.

    The reverse matters just as much. Leadership can become so preoccupied with understanding people’s circumstances that accountability disappears. When someone says, “I don’t have the capacity to do this,” my instinct is to ask what we mean by capacity. Is the problem time, workload, confidence, skill, competing priorities or something else? But the conversation cannot end there, particularly when one person’s unfinished work prevents five other people from doing theirs. I might paraphrase the situation back: you have too much work to complete this task, and if it is not completed, these colleagues cannot complete theirs. Help me understand what we need to fix. That is not about catching somebody out. It is about recognising that in organisations, capacity and responsibility are rarely private matters. Our work creates conditions for other people’s work.

    This is why I increasingly think leadership sits in an awkward space between enabling and controlling. We owe people clarity, context, workable systems and reasonable support. We should remove unnecessary obstacles and be prepared to change systems that no longer serve their purpose. But once those conditions are reasonably in place, people also owe something to one another: preparation, engagement, honest effort and a willingness to ask for support when they need it. Good leadership cannot mean taking responsibility away from everyone else. Nor can accountability mean ignoring the environment in which people are being asked to perform.

    The same tension appears when leaders introduce something new. In one organisation, we introduced an online portfolio intended to make the work taking place with our students more visible to their families. The intention was sensible: create a richer connection between the organisation and the people it served. Some colleagues took to it extremely well. Then an unintended benchmark began to emerge. Families could see how much different teams were posting, and some started comparing staff on that basis: why can’t this group be more like that one? We had created visibility, but we had not sufficiently defined what good use of that visibility looked like. Posting activity risked becoming a proxy for professional quality, even though the real quality of the work lay in the difference people were making, not in how busy an online feed appeared.

    We eventually introduced clearer expectations around the range and frequency of posting, but by then an important lesson had already been delivered. Systems do not merely organise work. They signal what matters. What we make visible, what we count and what we repeatedly ask people to produce can become a definition of quality whether we intended it to or not. This is hardly unique to education. Sales teams can confuse calls made with relationships built; organisations can confuse reports produced with decisions improved; leaders can confuse activity with progress. A system can be effective according to its own mechanics and still have the wrong impact.

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    I have been told in the past that I could be very good at the surface-level things while not always being as strong on what sat underneath them. I regard that as a historical criticism, but a useful one. Leadership makes surface activity seductive because it is visible. New branding, new programmes, polished communication, busy dashboards and well-attended events all provide evidence that something is happening. The foundations are harder to see. Yet the organisation beneath the organisation—the capacity, relationships, processes, expectations and assumptions that make the visible work possible—is often where the real health of the place resides.

    Even the language of “strong foundations” can mislead us, though. We tend to speak as if the task is to build them once and then protect them. The scheduling system taught me otherwise. A foundation can be perfectly sound for the organisation that existed when it was built and still become unsuitable for the organisation that emerges later. If the structure above it changes, the foundations may need to change too. The challenge is knowing what should be protected and what has become an anchor. There is no single test that removes judgement from that decision, but repeated comments, recurring friction, disproportionate effort and difficulty adapting are all reasons to investigate. They are signals, not verdicts.

    That last distinction matters. Repeated criticism does not automatically mean a process should be abandoned. Sometimes people object because they cannot yet see what a piece of organisational infrastructure is protecting. I have worked in situations where investment in functions such as HR attracted questions about why the money was not going more directly towards the organisation’s core purpose. Yet experience of other organisations had shown me what adequately resourced support functions looked like and what happened when one person was effectively expected to do the work of several. The frontline does not remain strong by starving everything behind it. Some of the most important organisational work is almost invisible when it is being done well.

    Experience helped me make that judgement, but experience needs checking too. “I’ve seen this before” can be wisdom or bias. One of the safeguards is having enough contact with other organisations and other leaders to stop your own environment becoming your only definition of normal. I have found enormous value in asking colleagues elsewhere how they organise something, what staffing they use, what works and what does not. The point is not to copy them. Benchmarking becomes another form of laziness if we simply import somebody else’s answer. Multiple eyes are useful only when they are combined with a serious understanding of our own context.

    This is also why succession is more complicated than handing over a folder and explaining the processes. When I leave a role, I want the next person to benefit from what I have learned. They should not have to rediscover every piece of context, every reason behind a decision or every practical lesson accumulated over years. But I am increasingly conscious that a thorough handover can carry a hidden message: this is how I did it, therefore this is how the job is done. That is not succession. That is replication.

    If I could go back to the point at which I handed over that Excel system, I would still explain it. I would still show why it existed and how it worked. But I would add something much more explicit: this is not the be-all and end-all. It solves the problem we have now. If you can find something better—particularly something that can adapt as the organisation changes—use it. Hindsight makes that easy to say, of course. The point is not that I should somehow have predicted eighteen years of technological and organisational change. It is that perhaps we should design our handovers, and our systems, for future questioning rather than future certainty.

    That requires a subtle change in what we mean by sustainability. A sustainable system is not necessarily one that lasts unchanged. Sometimes the most sustainable thing about a system should be its capacity to be reviewed, adapted or replaced. Organisations need deliberate opportunities to ask whether a process remains effective, whether the effort still matches the value, whether its impact is what was intended and whether the conditions that originally justified it still exist. Crucially, that review should not depend entirely on the person who created the system. A healthy organisation should not require the inventor to announce that their invention has expired.

    There is an emotional difficulty in this that leadership writing sometimes skips over. We become attached to things we create. When something survives us, it can feel like legacy. Seeing an event I had helped establish still taking place years later gave me a small flash of pride. So did the scheduling system. That reaction is understandable, but it is also dangerous. Legacy can flatter a leader at exactly the moment it should concern them. Perhaps the better legacy is not a process that everybody continues to use. Perhaps it is an organisation confident enough to understand why the process existed, retain what remains valuable and discard the rest without feeling that it is somehow betraying the person who built it.

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    None of this means organisations should pursue permanent reinvention. Change has costs. A better scheduling programme may require a considerable initial investment of time from someone whose workload is already full. The sensible leadership response is not simply to announce that modernisation is strategically important and add it to the pile. “We don’t have capacity” should prompt a real conversation about what capacity means and what would need to move, stop or be supported for the change to happen. Nor should leaders assume that complaints disappearing means a change has succeeded. Silence is not agreement. People may stop objecting because they have been convinced, but they may also stop because they have become resigned.

    Equally, not everything valuable can be reduced to efficiency. Organisations contain traditions, relationships and ways of working that carry identity and belonging. Something can look inefficient and still preserve something worth protecting. That is why judgement cannot rest only on what is easiest to measure. We need to understand both what a practice produces and what it preserves. We also need to recognise that the two can change over time. A tradition that once created connection can become routine. A system that once saved time can become cumbersome. A process that once provided necessary consistency can begin restricting judgement. Yesterday’s solution does not become today’s mistake simply because time has passed, but neither does yesterday’s success earn permanent protection.

    Perhaps that is the thread connecting meetings, communication, technology, succession and the systems we inherit. Leadership is partly the work of creating conditions in which other people can do good work. That means giving enough clarity without scripting every move, enough structure without creating dependency, enough continuity without turning history into obligation, and enough accountability without pretending that context does not matter. Those balances are never settled permanently because the organisation itself does not stand still.

    The question I now find more useful than “Does this work?” is not especially complicated. It is simply harder to answer: “What is this helping us do now?” The word now matters. It forces us to separate the reason a system was created from the value it currently provides. It invites the people experiencing the system to contribute to the judgement. It makes room for evidence, context and unintended consequences. And it leaves open the possibility that something we are proud of, something familiar, even something we once built ourselves, may have completed its useful life.

    There is no shame in that. The spreadsheet did its job. The annual celebration had its moment. The early systems and habits I developed were responses to the leader I was and the organisations I was working with at the time. The mistake would be to demand that today’s people keep living inside yesterday’s solutions simply because those solutions carry our fingerprints. A leader should leave knowledge behind, certainly. Context too. But perhaps one of the most generous things we can also leave is permission: permission to question what we built, to adapt what still has value and, when the time comes, to make something better.

    If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.

  • Can You Still Be Influenced?

    Can You Still Be Influenced?

    One of the easiest mistakes to make as a leader is to forget how long you have already been thinking. An idea arrives, you turn it over for weeks, question it, talk it through with a few people, solve some of its obvious problems and gradually reach the point where it feels clear. Then you present it to everyone else and wonder why they do not immediately see what you see. From your perspective, you have explained the destination. From theirs, you have appeared halfway through a conversation they did not know was happening.

    I learned that fairly painfully while working in Germany. We were introducing a new way of starting the working day, influenced partly by conversations I had already had with colleagues who had experience of the approach. In my head, the reasoning had developed over time. Some other members of the team had not been part of any of that thinking. I effectively presented them with the result and then interpreted some of their response as resistance. Looking back, their reaction was hardly surprising. They were not resisting a journey we had taken together. I had started travelling without them and was now asking why they were not beside me.

    The mistake became more obvious because I did not stop. Once I realised that people were behind the thinking, I tried to catch them up while continuing to move forward. At that stage of my leadership, stopping did not really feel like a legitimate option. Continuing felt decisive. Pausing felt as though I might be losing momentum. With hindsight, the more confident decision would probably have been to stop, go back and rebuild enough understanding before moving again. Sometimes leadership is not about maintaining momentum. Sometimes it is about recognising that the momentum is carrying you away from the people you need with you.

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    There was a similar lesson in a much bigger structural decision. I believed the organisation needed an additional senior leadership role. It was growing quickly, the existing structures were being outgrown and there was too great a gap between me and the wider team. At executive level, the need made sense. To many colleagues, however, what they saw was another management position being created when money could have been spent elsewhere. Again, I had access to the problem that had produced the decision. They were largely presented with the decision itself. I still believe the role was needed. The mistake was assuming that because the decision was mine to make, the thinking behind it did not need to be shared more effectively.

    That distinction matters. Involvement does not guarantee buy-in, and leaders should be wary of pretending that every decision is democratic when it is not. Sometimes responsibility genuinely sits with a particular role or group. But participation and decision rights are not the same thing. People can be brought into the problem without being given a veto over the solution. They can understand the pressures, alternatives and trade-offs even when the final decision remains elsewhere. Involvement may not create agreement. What it can do is reduce unnecessary resistance and improve the quality of the conversation around a decision.

    Germany became an extraordinary learning environment for me because it challenged assumptions that had survived several previous organisations and countries. Much of my earlier experience had been relatively top down. In some contexts, people were also less likely to challenge someone in authority openly. That can be deceptively comfortable for a leader. If people do what you ask, it is easy to conclude that you have influenced them successfully. But compliance is not the same as agreement. People can accept a decision, carry it out and then complain about it somewhere you cannot hear them. Silence can look remarkably like buy-in when you are the person at the top.

    Germany made that much harder to ignore. Consultation, different expectations around participation and structures such as works councils meant that simply arriving with an approach that had worked elsewhere was not enough. In retrospect, that was exactly what I needed. I had accumulated evidence that certain ways of leading could produce results, but I had been too ready to treat contextual success as proof of a universally good approach. The absence of challenge in one culture had sometimes reinforced habits that another culture immediately questioned.

    That experience changed the way I think about fresh eyes. I want new people to bring their previous experience. It would be absurd to recruit capable people and then ask them to forget everything they have learned. But experience should widen the possibilities we consider, not close the discussion. “At my last organisation, we did it this way” is useful information. It is not, by itself, an argument. The more useful questions are what would this improve here, why would it improve it here, and what part are you prepared to play in making it work? Context gets a vote.

    I have been on the other side of that conversation too. In a later role, someone brought me an idea that I thought had real potential. I did not simply approve it because I liked it, nor dismiss it because it had come from elsewhere. I brought another colleague into a follow-up conversation, deliberately someone whose perspective differed from mine. They could test what I was seeing from another angle. In the end, they agreed that the idea had merit. What mattered was not that my first reaction had been validated. The idea had survived contact with another perspective.

    That is increasingly how I think about influence. It is often described as the ability to bring people with you, which is certainly part of leadership. But there is something incomplete about a model in which influence travels only one way. If I expect other people to remain open to my reasoning, I have to remain open to theirs. If I want them to change their minds when the evidence warrants it, they need to see that I can do the same. Otherwise, an invitation to challenge me is little more than theatre.

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    I have told teams explicitly that I do not want people saying yes to me all the time. But saying that is the easy part. Leaders frequently say that their door is always open, that challenge is welcome and that they want honest feedback. People judge those claims by what happens afterwards. If somebody challenges a decision and I become defensive, dismissive or visibly irritated, they have learned something much more powerful than anything I said about openness. They may still come through the door next time, but perhaps with a safer subject. Eventually they may stop coming at all.

    That was something experience had to teach me. Earlier in my career, I could be far too vocal with my immediate thoughts and feelings. I had also completed a Master’s degree shortly before taking on my first significant senior leadership role. I had plenty of ideas about leadership and professional development. What I did not yet have was the same depth of experience in living those ideas when somebody was standing in front of me disagreeing with them. It is possible to believe intellectually in challenge while still reacting badly when challenge becomes personal. The test of an open culture is not whether the leader says disagreement is allowed. It is whether people have watched disagreement happen safely.

    There is a balance. People do not want a leader who changes direction every time somebody raises an objection. Being influenceable is not the same as being indecisive. Leaders still have to make decisions, sometimes unpopular ones, and there will be occasions when I hear a challenge, respect it and still decide not to change course. Over time, the people I have worked with most closely have become comfortable with that. They know they can question me without the relationship being damaged, but they also know that being heard does not guarantee getting the answer they want. Mutual respect has to survive both outcomes.

    When somebody does change my mind, I think it is important to say so. There is no particular virtue in pretending that the revised decision was mine all along. Admitting that another person’s reasoning was better does not automatically weaken authority. Used honestly, it can strengthen the credibility of future decisions because people know the conclusion was not protected merely because it belonged to the leader. Of course, constant reversals create a different problem. Nobody wants to follow somebody who cannot decide. But there is a considerable distance between thoughtful revision and habitual flip-flopping.

    Influence also depends on knowing when not to use it. Earlier in my leadership, I probably underestimated how much relationships remember. I now see little value in fighting equally hard for everything. If another part of an organisation carries most of the consequences of a scheduling decision or a change to a shared information system, I may have a preference without needing that preference to prevail. Sometimes the right thing to do is let the people most affected have greater weight and then genuinely support the outcome.

    That is not quite the same as keeping a ledger of favours. I do not want leadership relationships reduced to, “I gave you that, so now you owe me this.” But there is a form of reciprocity in healthy senior teams. If I have demonstrated that I can compromise when something matters more to you than it does to me, then when a decision has major consequences for my area, I hope you will approach it with the same organisational generosity. Influence is partly built through people learning that you do not insist on winning simply because you can.

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    I have worked with leaders who fight relentlessly for their own area, and there is something admirable in that. People deserve leaders who will advocate for them. The difficulty comes when everything becomes a battle. If every issue is presented as critical, colleagues eventually lose the ability to distinguish genuine principle from preference. It can also reveal a more serious problem: perhaps the leadership team is not really operating as a team at all, but as representatives of competing territories. At some point I find myself wanting to ask, “Help me understand why you have to fight for absolutely everything. Are we actually trying to reach the same destination?”

    Organisational politics sits uncomfortably inside that conversation. I am not interested in proving that my area is better than somebody else’s or advertising myself simply to establish status. I would rather spend the energy trying to make the work good than telling everybody how good it is. But organisations contain competing priorities, limited resources, personalities, histories and relationships. Pretending politics does not exist does not make leadership purer. It simply makes us less conscious of the forces already affecting decisions.

    There is a line, though, and I do not think it is always perfectly clear. I have occasionally said to someone, in effect, “This is not the decision I would have made, but I will support it.” That can have an interesting effect. Once somebody knows the decision is genuinely theirs, they may go through hell or high water to make it succeed. Their ownership increases. There is also, if I am being candid, a slightly underhand element to recognising that effect and using it deliberately. If the decision fails, my original judgement may appear vindicated. If it succeeds, the organisation wins and the other person has demonstrated that their judgement was better than mine. Used sparingly and accompanied by genuine support, that can create autonomy. Used cynically, it could become manipulation.

    The uncomfortable part of leadership is that motives are rarely completely pure. I can be embarrassed that I was wrong and still be genuinely pleased that somebody else was right. I can support another person’s decision while retaining doubts about it. I can choose not to fight an issue partly because I believe it is the right organisational choice and partly because I know relationships have memories. The answer is not to pretend ego and politics disappear when we become experienced leaders. It is to become conscious enough of them that they do not quietly take control.

    I have also learned that refusing to play status games carries a cost. Years ago, an additional responsibility became available around leading professional development across an organisation. There was no extra pay and it meant more work, but I wanted the opportunity. I was passed over for somebody who had been much more effective at communicating their capability to the person making the decision, and I became their understudy. I supported them. I would still support them if I could replay the situation. But much of what followed was discussion rather than action, while I and several colleagues began doing practical work alongside it because we felt something actually needed to happen.

    Interestingly, I still do not think the lesson is that I should have promoted myself more aggressively. If I could return to that moment, I would be more likely to ask the leader, “Help me understand why I wasn’t given the opportunity.” I would want to understand the judgement rather than kick up a fuss about the outcome. And once the decision had been made, I would still support the person appointed. What I might do differently is challenge harder when talking begins to substitute for doing. Losing the role matters less to me than watching an organisation fail to move.

    That is probably why influence, for me, has become less about winning. Winning an argument can produce compliance without commitment. Winning a role can produce status without impact. Getting your preferred decision can leave relationships weaker than before. Conversely, giving way does not mean you have been defeated, and changing your mind does not mean somebody has taken authority away from you. The more useful question is what happens next. Does the decision improve something? Do people understand enough to act? Can the relationship withstand disagreement? Is there room for better information to alter the course?

    There is a personal side to this that I have had to acknowledge as well. I do not take compliments particularly easily. Recently I opened an old notebook while looking for some spare paper and found several letters and notes from people at a previous organisation. I had thought I had thrown them away. My wife had kept them. Reading them again was unexpectedly humbling. People had written about ways I had supported them, helped them develop or improved aspects of the organisation. My instinct still tried to minimise some of it: perhaps they were simply being kind. Then another part of me had to acknowledge the obvious. People do not generally sit down, put pen to paper and write those things unless they mean something.

    There is a strange connection to influence in that. We can be wary of other people’s negative judgements while being equally unwilling to accept their positive ones. We can insist that we do not want to prove ourselves and then make our contribution unnecessarily invisible. I still have little appetite for performative self promotion, but perhaps there is a difference between demanding recognition and being willing to recognise evidence of your own impact. Influence does not require shouting about yourself. Nor does humility require pretending that your work has made no difference.

    The strongest leadership relationships I have experienced eventually reach a point where influence becomes genuinely reciprocal. People will challenge a decision not because they are trying to undermine the leader, but because they trust the relationship enough to disagree. The leader can hear that challenge without treating it as disloyalty. Sometimes the challenge changes the decision. Sometimes it does not. Either way, people leave knowing that their contribution was considered rather than merely tolerated.

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    That, to me, is a much more demanding form of influence than persuasion. It requires leaders to bring people through enough of their thinking that confusion is not casually labelled resistance. It requires us to know when our preference matters and when somebody else’s should carry more weight. It asks us to welcome experience without worshipping precedent, to recognise politics without becoming consumed by it, and to create enough safety that disagreement reaches us before it disappears into corridors and private conversations.

    A leader should be able to influence people. I still think leadership involves inspiring people towards a common goal. But the older I get, the less impressed I am by influence that only works in one direction. If everybody around me can be moved by my thinking but nobody can move mine, that is not evidence of exceptional leadership. It may simply mean I have become very difficult to challenge.

    Perhaps the better test is not how often people follow our ideas, but whether thoughtful people still believe it is worth bringing us theirs. When they do, we do not have to agree. We do not have to surrender the decision. But we should remain capable of hearing something that changes our mind. The moment a leader becomes impossible to influence may also be the moment their own influence begins to lose its value.

    If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.

  • Before You Decide Who Someone Is

    Before You Decide Who Someone Is

    Years ago, I joined an organisation having already been warned about one particular colleague. I was told that she took a lot of time off and, more significantly, that she was not especially committed to the organisation. The first part turned out to be true. She did have periods of absence. The second part did not. Once I had the chance to work alongside her, I saw the quality of what she produced, the way she interacted with people, the thought she gave to her work and the contribution she made when she was there. She was, quite simply, a quality colleague. But by then something uncomfortable had already happened. I had arrived with somebody else’s interpretation in my head, and at some point I had allowed that interpretation to become mine.

    I know that because several years later she reminded me of something I had said. I had questioned, or at least strongly implied, whether her time away from work reflected a lack of commitment. I barely remembered the conversation. She did. In fact, she mentioned it more than once. By then I knew how wrong that judgement had been, and I had apologised, but what stayed with me was the imbalance between the significance of the moment for each of us. I had said something and moved on. She had carried it. Four years after we first met, she could still remember a leader making her feel that she was not trusted or that her commitment was in doubt.

    That experience sometimes takes me back even further, to the first day of my first post-graduate job, around 26 years ago. My new boss did not come to see me or even say hello during the day. Before a staff meeting, I unknowingly sat in her chair and was quickly told that I needed to move. She arrived late, walked slowly to the chair, looked around the room, sat down and said, “Power. I just love it.” Those were the first words I ever heard her say to me. I can still quote them more than two decades later. She may have forgotten them before the meeting was over. I did not. They became attached to a much wider experience of working for her, one that was difficult enough that I eventually left England. The point is not that her comment and mine were equivalent. They were not. It is that leaders rarely get to decide which of their words another person will carry.

    That is why I have become increasingly interested in what happens before a leader decides who somebody is. We have to form judgements. Leadership would be impossible without them. We decide whom to appoint, whom to trust with greater responsibility, when somebody needs support, when performance needs challenging and when a pattern has become too significant to ignore. Experience should make us better at this. After 26 years in education and nearly 20 in leadership, I would be concerned if I had learned nothing about reading situations or people. But experience creates a danger alongside the advantage. The more patterns we recognise, the easier it becomes to believe that because something looks familiar, we already know what it means.

    Absence is a good example. Attendance matters. An organisation cannot function if people simply do not turn up, and repeated absence can have a very real effect on colleagues. But attendance and commitment are not synonyms. I have worked with people who were physically present almost all the time yet contributed remarkably little, and with others whose circumstances meant they had periods away from work but who were completely invested when they were there. Their work was excellent, their relationships mattered to them and their contribution was obvious. If two people have the same number of absences, it does not automatically follow that the leadership response should be identical. Circumstances, patterns, impact and behaviour matter. Fairness is not achieved by pretending context does not exist.

    Earlier in my leadership, I did not always find that comfortable. I could worry so much about being seen to have favourites that I overcorrected. Sometimes the tougher decision felt safer because nobody could accuse me of favouritism afterwards. With experience, I have become less interested in looking impartial and more interested in whether I can stand behind the reasoning. Consistency still matters, but I now think of consistency more in terms of process and principle than identical outcomes. People deserve time. They deserve an attempt to understand what is happening. They deserve decisions based on evidence rather than labels. If that process reveals different circumstances, different responses may be entirely fair.

    There is a phrase I use frequently when somebody tells me that a decision is unfair: “Help me understand why you think it’s not fair.” Sometimes they identify something I have missed. Sometimes I have information they do not have and cannot appropriately share. Sometimes we simply reach different conclusions. Being heard does not mean getting the outcome you wanted, and listening cannot become a false promise that every challenge will reverse a decision. But the phrase matters because it keeps open the possibility that the leader’s picture is incomplete. Everyone in an organisation has information that other people do not. A leader may know more about the wider decision; the person affected almost certainly knows more about their own circumstances. Neither should confuse having part of the picture with having all of it.

    I have learned to be particularly wary of the stories that attach themselves to people. Someone we rate highly makes a mistake and we think, “That’s unusual for them.” Someone who has acquired a reputation for being difficult makes exactly the same mistake and we think, “There they go again.” Track record should matter. Reputation should make us more cautious. They are not the same thing. A genuine pattern is evidence accumulated over time. A reputation can be an interpretation repeated often enough that it begins to sound like evidence.

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    The opposite problem is just as dangerous. I once appointed someone who interviewed extraordinarily well. I thought they were going to be excellent. They turned out to be one of the worst hires I have made: unreliable, lazy and very different from the person I thought I had appointed. What makes that example uncomfortable is that colleagues began telling me there was a problem before I was ready to believe them. I discounted some of what I heard because several of the people raising concerns had their own clique and had previously been highly critical of colleagues whom I considered very good. I had reason to question the source. But then the same concerns began coming from people whose judgement I trusted more consistently. Eventually I saw the behaviour myself. They had been right.

    Looking back, I was not only giving the new employee the benefit of the doubt. I was giving my own decision the benefit of the doubt. I had chosen this person. Accepting the evidence also meant accepting that my judgement at interview had been wrong. That is an uncomfortable form of confirmation bias because it can masquerade as fairness or patience. We may tell ourselves that we are refusing to rush to judgement when, in reality, we are protecting a judgement we have already made. I left the organisation not long afterwards, which meant other people inherited the consequences of my poor appointment. Leadership decisions do not become less consequential because our intentions were good.

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    This is why I still want to hear inherited knowledge when I join an organisation, even though I am cautious about inherited conclusions. If an outgoing leader says, “I’ll tell you who the difficult people are,” I am willing to listen. Experience has value. It would be wasteful to discard everything somebody has learned simply to prove that I am independent minded. But I do not want their conclusion to become my verdict. Different leaders create different relationships. Someone who struggled under one manager may flourish under another. Someone described as difficult may have been difficult for that particular leader to lead. Equally, the warning may turn out to be entirely accurate. A fresh start should not mean wilful blindness.

    I have seen that from both directions. I have given people a fresh start and watched them become reinvigorated, only for old habits eventually to return. At times I probably backed off too quickly. I trusted the agreement rather than checking the follow through. Over the years I have become particularly wary of what I privately think of as the “super agreeable” response: the person who enthusiastically says, “Absolutely, yes,” to everything in a difficult conversation. Agreement can sound like understanding and commitment when it demonstrates neither. One practical habit I developed was asking the other person to record the agreed notes after a difficult meeting. It is revealing. Instead of both of us relying on enthusiastic nodding or later arguing about my version of events, I can see what they actually understood, and we can correct any difference there and then.

    That does not mean I trust people less. If anything, my starting philosophy remains unusually simple: when I employ someone to do a job, I start by trusting them to do it. I do not see why a new colleague should have to pay for the behaviour of somebody who disappointed me previously. But trust is not the absence of follow through, boundaries or accountability. I can trust someone’s intention and still check whether something happened. I can believe in somebody and still ask for evidence. The more difficult lesson is that once trust has genuinely been broken, it changes. Even in close family relationships, love can remain unconditional while a particular situation carries a little more doubt because of what happened before. Perhaps trust begins broadly and becomes more specific as evidence accumulates.

    That matters because one of the easiest pieces of leadership advice to give is, “Would you judge somebody else the same way?” It is a useful question, but the honest answer should sometimes be no. If two people have behaved differently over a sustained period, their track records are relevant. If someone has repeatedly broken an agreement, it would be strange to pretend that history does not exist. The discipline is not to ignore patterns; it is to make sure there really is a pattern before deciding we have seen one. Relevant history should inform judgement. A label should not replace it.

    I have also become more conscious of the speed at which judgement happens. When I was a younger leader, I was far too willing to vocalise whatever I was thinking. If somebody brought me bad news, my frustration might be immediately visible or audible. I was not necessarily frustrated with the person standing in front of me, but they had no way of knowing that. With experience I became much more controlled. If something serious lands in front of me now, I am far more likely to contain my initial reaction, ask questions and take time before deciding what I think. I do not need to process every negative emotion in front of the person who has brought me the problem.

    “Help me understand” has become useful for exactly that reason. It is not magic wording, and curiosity should never become a technique for avoiding accountability. What the phrase gives me is a gap between stimulus and judgement. It gives me time to process what I have heard and gives the other person space to add information before I reach a conclusion. That gap matters. A leader’s immediate reaction teaches people whether it is safe to bring bad news next time. If the messenger repeatedly receives the emotional impact of the message, eventually the leader may discover that problems arrive later, filtered or only when they can no longer be hidden.

    The same principle applies when honesty is required. I value candour, probably more now than earlier in my career, but I have learned that honesty and brutality are not the same thing. The content matters, but delivery matters enormously. A difficult conversation can create emotion; the leader’s responsibility is not to become emotionless but to stop their emotion controlling the conversation. It helps to talk about behaviour or something the person can change rather than turning the discussion into a judgement about their whole being. Tone, body language, listening, paraphrasing and the language we choose all affect whether honesty becomes usable information or simply an injury the other person remembers.

    I know that because I have been on both sides of memorable leadership comments. My colleague remembered my judgement about her commitment years after I had forgotten saying it. I still remember “Power. I just love it” after 26 years. Leaders can spend considerable time thinking about the decisions they make and surprisingly little time considering the sentences that accompany them. Yet sometimes the sentence lasts longer than the decision. Once we decide that somebody is lazy, difficult, uncommitted, weak, brilliant or indispensable, that judgement begins to leak into the opportunities we offer, the mistakes we notice, the explanations we believe and the language we use.

    That is where a judgement can become self reinforcing. If someone feels repeatedly ignored because a leader has already decided what kind of person they are, eventually they may stop trying to change the leader’s mind. They disengage, withdraw or become defensive. The leader can then look at that behaviour and think, “See? I was right about them.” A positive label can distort judgement too. We forgive evidence because it does not fit the person we believe we know. Either way, the danger is not having an opinion. It is allowing an opinion to become a box from which contradictory evidence cannot escape.

    Teams can help, particularly when the stakes are high. For small, reversible decisions I am comfortable relying heavily on experience. For decisions with greater consequences, I increasingly want more eyes on the problem. Recruitment already recognises this. We use panels and multiple interactions because we know one person’s impression can be incomplete. The same logic should not suddenly disappear after appointment. But a group is not automatically wiser. Four people can share the same bias, reinforce the same reputation or belong to the same clique. Four people independently seeing something I have missed is important evidence; four people repeating one another is not necessarily four pieces of evidence.

    I remember a discussion about a member of staff where most of my team believed one course of action was necessary and I initially disagreed. I wanted to give the person more benefit of the doubt. I did not rush the decision. I left the meeting, reflected on what had been said and slept on it. By the next day my judgement had shifted. I went back to the team and told them that although my view had been different the day before, having thought about their evidence, I believed I had been wrong and would change my approach. Their reaction was mainly relief. I do not think admitting I had changed my mind weakened their confidence in me. If anything, acknowledging that I could be wrong probably strengthened it.

    There have also been occasions when I have listened to the majority and still held my position. Sometimes I was right. Sometimes I was wrong. That is an important limitation to admit because there is no process that makes leadership judgement infallible. Sometimes you gather the available facts, listen to experienced people, examine your own assumptions, give the decision time, trust your instincts and still get it wrong. Good leadership cannot guarantee the correct judgement. What it can do is make the route to that judgement more responsible, more open to challenge and more capable of correction.

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    Perhaps that is why I keep returning to time. Before making a consequential judgement about somebody, I think we owe them time when time is available. Not delay for its own sake, and certainly not endless patience while somebody’s behaviour repeatedly damages everyone around them. Time should be used. Find out more. Gather stronger evidence. Build enough of a relationship for a more honest conversation to become possible. Ask broader questions. “Tell me about your time here. What are you finding easy? What are you finding difficult?” Sometimes we learn more by creating space for somebody to tell us what we did not know enough to ask.

    There is a limit. Giving somebody time should not mean asking everyone else to tolerate repeated harm indefinitely. Fair process can be consistent while outcomes differ. We can give people the same basic discipline of enquiry, evidence, opportunity and reflection, then respond differently to what that process reveals. Eventually a leader has to decide. Curiosity without accountability becomes avoidance; accountability without curiosity can become injustice.

    Experience has made me more confident in my ability to judge people, not less. I do think I am better at it than I was 20 years ago. But I hope experience has also made me more willing to accept that I may be wrong. Those two things need not contradict each other. Perhaps the danger comes when experience improves only our certainty. “I’ve seen this before” can be the beginning of useful pattern recognition, or it can be the sentence that closes down everything we have not yet seen.

    I have known leaders whose opinions of me changed over time, sometimes only after considerable effort. I have known others whose opinions seemed fixed regardless of what I did. When you believe there is nothing you can do to alter somebody’s view of you, it becomes tempting to think, “What is the point?” That response may then appear to prove the leader’s judgement, but the leader has helped create the conditions in which it emerged. We should be very careful about putting people into boxes and then congratulating ourselves when they stop trying to climb out.

    So I am less interested now in forming an opinion of somebody quickly than in gauging one. There is a difference. An early impression can be useful. A gut reaction after years of experience can be useful. Other people’s warnings can be useful. None of them has to become a verdict. If the decision is low stakes, experience may be enough. If the consequences are significant and time is available, take it. Let the first impression encounter the person. Let reputation encounter evidence. Let your interpretation encounter theirs. Let certainty wait long enough to discover whether it deserves to become certainty.

    Because eventually we will all get somebody wrong. When that happens, the responsibility does not end with admitting privately that we made a reasonable mistake. Own it. Change the decision if it can still be changed. Apologise where an apology is owed. Learn enough from it that the next person does not have to carry the cost of the previous judgement. The aim is not to become a leader who never forms opinions. It is to become one who remembers, particularly when another person’s career, confidence or sense of belonging may be affected, that an opinion formed today does not have to become the person they are allowed to be tomorrow.

    If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.

  • The Work Will Still Be There

    The Work Will Still Be There

    One Christmas Day, I sat down to work on a handbook. It was not meaningless work. Quite the opposite. I was in my first major leadership position and there was no single guide bringing together the information staff and parents kept asking for. The handbook would solve a genuine problem. It would make things clearer, reduce repeated questions and help the organisation work better. I had also decided that it needed to be ready when everyone returned in the new year. I felt behind. So, while my wife, children and in-laws were together, I spent hours working. At the time, I could explain exactly why. Looking back, I struggle to explain why any of it had to happen on Christmas Day.

    That is one of the difficulties with exhaustion and overwork. From inside them, individual decisions can look entirely reasonable. There is always another email, another deadline, another problem that would be easier if it were resolved now. Nobody necessarily announces that work has become too important. Life simply starts accommodating it. You socialise a little less. You take longer over things. You stop getting involved in things you would normally enjoy. You arrive home with very little left. Eventually your world has become smaller, but because every reduction happened for an apparently sensible reason, you may not notice the pattern. I have experienced different kinds of exhaustion during my career. Sometimes the environment in which I was working depleted me. At other times, I helped create the exhaustion myself because I was determined to make the work as good as I possibly could.

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    The second kind is particularly difficult for conscientious people to recognise because it can look so much like commitment. I hold myself to high standards and I am highly self critical. Earlier in my career, particularly when I had something to prove, hard work became part of the evidence I presented to myself that I was doing the job properly. Later, when I no longer felt I needed to prove that I could lead, the motivation changed rather than disappeared. I had been promoted, worked in larger organisations and returned to roles with more experience and confidence. People thought I was good at what I did. I thought I was good at it too. Then the pressure became not to let them down. The story in my head was different, but the behaviour could look remarkably similar.

    There are times when exceptional effort really is required. I have worked in situations where somebody simply had to carry the boxes. I have no objection to long hours when circumstances genuinely demand them, and I do not believe sustainable working means pretending every workload complaint is automatically reasonable. I remember giving a capable colleague in Germany around eight hours to produce a short video and being told the time was insufficient. The disagreement eventually reached the works council, and I challenged it strongly because I believed the expectation was fair. Protecting people from unreasonable demands cannot mean abandoning reasonable expectations of performance. The question I would ask now is simple: help me understand what the barriers are. That question leaves room for both possibilities. Perhaps the workload is unreasonable. Perhaps something is preventing a capable person from delivering. Perhaps the expectation is reasonable and performance needs addressing. Curiosity does not remove accountability; it helps us apply it fairly.

    The irony is that I have often extended that curiosity to other people more readily than to myself. If somebody on my team was overloaded, I might tell them to work from home for a day so they could concentrate on a major project without the normal interruptions. I would ask what could be taken off their workload. I would have regarded that as sensible management, not weakness. Yet I could interpret the same adjustment in myself as evidence that I was not coping. I knew the advice. I simply did not always believe I was entitled to follow it. That contradiction matters because experienced leaders are not necessarily protected by knowing the right answers. We can be very good at recognising healthy practice for somebody else while constructing an exception for ourselves.

    Perhaps one useful test is to ask what advice we would give someone we respect if they were behaving exactly as we are. If I discovered that a colleague had spent hours working at home on Christmas Day to finish a handbook they had decided ought to be ready in January, I would be appalled. I would ask why it could not wait. I would probably tell them that nobody needed that level of sacrifice from them. Yet when I was the person doing it, the deadline felt real and the work felt necessary. High standards and self punishment can sit surprisingly close together, and I am not convinced we can always see the boundary while we are crossing it.

    Exhaustion complicates that judgement further because it does not merely reduce energy. It can change the way a situation appears. When I am very tired, I become slower. I overthink. I can become more emotional and more inclined towards worst case scenarios. I sometimes vocalise those possibilities too, which means my depleted state does not remain a private experience. It can affect the emotional temperature around me. That does not mean every concern produced by an exhausted person is irrational. Often there is a real problem underneath it. The difficulty is proportion. A possibility that deserves consideration can begin to feel like the inevitable outcome.

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    Very early in my leadership career, I remember being at work after very little sleep when a family member was involved in a tragically difficult situation. My concern was genuine and I knew it was affecting me. People around me could understand why I was upset, but some could also hold the situation differently. They could see something serious without experiencing it as the catastrophe I was imagining. Looking back, I do not regret that colleagues saw me emotional. I have never believed leadership requires pretending not to feel. What matters to me is recognising how little capacity I had available to process something genuinely difficult. Exhaustion had not invented the problem. It had changed the weight I gave to its most frightening possibilities.

    That is why people who know us well can sometimes see deterioration before we do. My wife has been the broken record in my life on more than one occasion, telling me that work was affecting me while I denied it. There was no dramatic intervention that finally changed my mind. My stubbornness simply wore off long enough for me to admit that she was right. Repetition itself became information. One comment can be dismissed as somebody else’s interpretation. When a person who knows you intimately keeps saying that you are more negative, more overwhelmed or simply not yourself, perhaps the useful response is not immediate agreement, but curiosity.

    Leaders face an additional problem because hierarchy makes this kind of feedback harder to receive. I have always tried to build teams in which people can speak freely, but psychological safety does not make hierarchy disappear. It is one thing for a colleague to challenge a proposal. It is another for them to look at the person leading the organisation and say, ‘You are exhausted and it is changing you.’ If somebody reaches the point where they are prepared to say that to their boss, the signs may already be difficult to ignore. Leaders therefore cannot outsource responsibility for noticing their own deterioration to the people around them. We need other signals too: changes in patience, perspective, pace, relationships, judgement and the parts of life that have quietly begun to disappear.

    Organisations can make this harder because visible effort is easy to praise. Someone is always first in, last out, answering messages at unusual hours and volunteering for the difficult job. We call them committed. Sometimes they are. I have praised that behaviour myself and probably will again when the circumstances genuinely warrant it. The challenge is recognising when exceptional effort deserves recognition without allowing it to become the expectation. There is something admirable about somebody stepping up when it genuinely matters. But visible effort and valuable contribution are not identical, and neither tells us whether the pattern is sustainable. If we praise sacrifice without becoming curious about its cost, we can accidentally turn an emergency behaviour into a cultural expectation. The employee receives admiration for giving 120 per cent, then quietly recalibrates 120 per cent as the new 100. Returning to something sustainable begins to feel like underperforming.

    The cost does not vanish simply because the work continues to be good. When capacity is limited and we refuse to compromise at work, the compromise happens somewhere else. For me, that was sometimes at home. I could protect my professional standards and still get the job done, but the people closest to me received whatever remained. That is an uncomfortable sentence to write because my family has always mattered more to me than my career. I was brought up with a strong belief that you look after your family, give them a good home and do what you can to make sure they are safe and happy. Yet it is perfectly possible to believe your family comes first while repeatedly giving work the first claim on your energy.

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    That contradiction has become harder to ignore as my children have grown. You can recover from exhaustion. You cannot recover time. A holiday may restore you, but it cannot return the evenings you missed or recreate a Christmas when your children were younger. I used to reach school holidays depleted and sometimes spend the first week or two ill, as though my body had finally been given permission to stop. I thought the holiday was the recovery plan. In reality, I had spent months borrowing against it. Even when the break restored me, it could not repay everything that had been spent getting there.

    This is why I have become wary of defending rest only in the language of performance. There is plenty of evidence in ordinary experience that rested people think more clearly, regulate emotion better and work more effectively. But if we are not careful, even wellbeing becomes another productivity strategy: sleep so that you can produce more tomorrow, take a break so that you can return sharper, spend time with your family so that you can come back to work refreshed. Those things may all happen, but they are not the only justification. Some parts of life deserve protection because work is not entitled to all of us. Playing with your children does not need to improve tomorrow’s leadership performance to be worth doing.

    I am still learning that. I have not arrived at some enlightened point where I always close the laptop at the right time. In fact, while building The Quiet Leader HQ, I have caught myself repeating parts of the old pattern. I want the website to make a strong first impression. I have built it myself with very little financial investment beyond the site itself, and my hope is that people who arrive here understand who I am and perhaps think, ‘I can relate to this person.’ Though during its creation I am conscious of how little time I am spending with my family.

    There is an uncomfortable irony in trying to protect future time with the people you love by taking yourself away from them in the present. I can see that contradiction now in a way I probably could not twenty years ago. Seeing it does not automatically make me stop. Fear of not being able to provide a solid future still makes me work harder. But at least I know what I am fighting.

    That may be one of the more useful questions underneath overwork: not simply, ‘Why am I working so much?’ but, ‘What am I frightened will happen if I stop?’ The answer may be failure. It may be disappointing people, losing status, appearing weak, becoming financially insecure or discovering that we are not as indispensable as we imagined. The fear may even be entirely understandable. But once we can name it, we have a better chance of deciding whether another hour of work is genuinely solving the problem or merely soothing the fear for another hour.

    For me, another test is marginal value. I am willing to put enormous effort into something when that effort materially improves the result. Eventually, though, there comes a point where a day’s work might produce one per cent improvement. At that point, perfectionism can become difficult to distinguish from an inability to let go. ‘I have done everything I reasonably can’ is a more useful standard than ‘I have done everything I possibly can.’ The word reasonably forces other obligations back into the equation. Excellence has a cost, and responsible leadership includes deciding when the next increment of quality is no longer worth what has to be surrendered to obtain it.

    None of this gives us a clean formula for sustainable leadership. There will be late nights. There will be crises. There will be moments when somebody has to carry the boxes, and I would distrust any philosophy of work that pretended otherwise. Equally, there will be people who use the language of workload to avoid reasonable expectations, just as there will be organisations that use the language of commitment to normalise unreasonable ones. Leadership requires judgement between those extremes. We should be able to ask people for a fair day’s work and defend their right to have a life beyond it. We should be able to admire extraordinary effort without quietly making extraordinary effort the admission price for being considered committed.

    Perhaps the harder challenge is applying that same fairness to ourselves. I have spent much of my career knowing things that I have not consistently practised. I have encouraged other people to slow down while accelerating myself. I have told people that asking for help is sensible while worrying that my own need for help might reveal weakness. I have protected other people’s capacity while treating mine as something to be stretched. Experience has not removed those contradictions. It has made them easier to recognise. Sometimes that is what growth looks like: not becoming the person who never repeats an old pattern, but becoming the person who notices sooner and has a better chance of choosing differently.

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    If I could return to that Christmas Day, I would not give myself a lecture about burnout, productivity or sustainable performance. I would tell myself to close the handbook. Go and do Lego with the kids. Play with them. Have a glass of wine with your wife. Sit with your family. Just stop. The handbook could have waited. There would be more work in January and considerably more work in the years that followed. What there would not be was another Christmas with those children at exactly that age, with that particular family gathered in that particular room.

    The work will still be there. Time as a whole family will not.

    If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.

  • The Organisation Beneath the Organisation

    The Organisation Beneath the Organisation

    One of the easiest mistakes to make when joining an organisation is to believe the first convincing explanation you hear about how the place works. Someone tells you who is difficult, who can be relied upon, which team is struggling, why a particular process exists. The account may be offered generously and in good faith. It may even contain a great deal of truth. But it is still one view, from one position, shaped by one person’s experience. I learned that lesson badly. Early in one role, I heard a strong view about someone and allowed it to influence how I approached them. I challenged them before I had taken enough time to understand them for myself. Four years later, when we knew each other far better, they told me how that first encounter had made them feel. We are friendly now and have remained in touch long after I left the organisation. That almost makes the memory more uncomfortable. I had behaved in a way I would now tell another leader to avoid.

    If I could have that first conversation again, I would not begin with what I had heard. I would begin much as I have learned to begin with people since: What are your strengths? Where do you think you need to develop? What can I do to help? The difference sounds small, but it changes the relationship. One approach arrives with a judgement already forming. The other arrives with curiosity. It does not mean ignoring what other people tell you. Leaders would be foolish to discard information simply because it is second hand. It means refusing to let the first opinion become the lens through which everything else is interpreted. The first opinion is not always the most correct opinion. Sometimes it is not even close.

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    That matters because every organisation has at least two versions of itself. There is the formal organisation: structures, reporting lines, responsibilities, procedures, job descriptions and strategic plans. Then there is the organisation people actually experience: who they ask when they are stuck, whose judgement they trust, who can persuade a room, who quietly resolves problems, which processes work only because somebody compensates for them, and where knowledge really lives. The two versions overlap, of course, but they are rarely identical. A title gives someone authority. It does not necessarily give them influence. A process tells you how work is supposed to happen. It does not necessarily tell you how the work gets done.

    I remember joining an organisation and noticing someone with no formal leadership position whose influence extended far beyond her role. People trusted her. She understood a great deal about how the place operated, and her view carried weight. Earlier in my leadership career, I suspect part of my instinct would have been to get someone like that on side. If she understood me, perhaps she would speak positively about me; if she spoke positively about me, perhaps other people would understand me too. I would still make the effort to build that relationship now, but for a different reason. Someone with that degree of informal influence can show you a part of the organisation that the organisational chart cannot.

    That does not mean the influential person is automatically right. I have encountered people with an extraordinary gift for persuasion whose influence was not particularly healthy. Charisma, confidence and a ready audience can make poor judgement travel remarkably well. There is a danger in discovering the informal hierarchy and then treating it as somehow more authentic than the formal one. It is not. An influential colleague may understand relationships, history and day to day experience exceptionally well while knowing little about confidential issues, financial constraints, competing priorities or strategic decisions. Formal authority can provide a wider view of the organisation. Informal proximity can provide a sharper view of one part of it. One can be wide but blurry; the other narrow but focused.

    The task is not to decide which view is the truth and discard the other. It is to understand what each can see. If an influential person is strongly critical of a decision, I may eventually conclude that their criticism is wrong. But their influence is still information. If many people trust their interpretation more readily than they trust the formal leadership’s, that tells me something about the organisation even if I disagree with the argument itself. Perhaps they have accumulated credibility over many years. Perhaps formal communication is weak. Perhaps people do not feel heard elsewhere. Perhaps the person is simply unusually persuasive. “Help me understand” is therefore not surrender. It is a way of finding out what is visible from where somebody else is standing.

    People can hide organisational reality in another way too: by being extremely good at their jobs. I have worked with someone who, in many respects, held a team together. They were capable, committed and wanted things done to a very high standard. They also found delegation difficult. We talked repeatedly about the need to distribute responsibility. They wanted to delegate, but they also wanted perfection, and those two desires did not always sit comfortably together. The more they personally ensured that things were done well, the more the team depended on them to ensure that things were done well. Their strength was real. So was the vulnerability developing around it.

    This is one of the stranger organisational problems because a single point of failure often does not look like failure at all. It can look like excellence. I have seen the same risk in a one person HR function. The work was being done, so on the surface the arrangement could appear efficient. My concern was what would happen if that person became unavailable through illness, an extended absence or simply leaving. There was not enough of a safety net. Nobody is irreplaceable, but that does not mean everything a person carries can be replaced quickly. You can appoint another employee. You cannot instantly recreate ten, twenty or forty years of organisational memory, relationships, judgement and accumulated context.

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    Documents matter here. Good procedures, handovers and records are essential reference points. They give the next person somewhere to begin and somewhere to look backwards. But there are limits to what can be captured on a page. You can read every book available about football and still not know how to play football. Some knowledge exists in the doing. Judgement develops through making decisions, seeing consequences, noticing patterns and working alongside people who know more than you do. An organisation therefore does not become resilient simply by documenting what an experienced person knows. It becomes more resilient when knowledge and capability are sufficiently shared that other people have actually had the chance to use them.

    Temporary workarounds can create exactly the same illusion. Sometimes an organisation genuinely cannot solve a problem properly yet. There may not be enough money, time or people, so someone steps in and keeps things moving. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The trouble often arrives later. The following year someone remembers that this person handled it brilliantly last time, so they are asked to do it again. Then again. What began as a practical response to a temporary problem slowly becomes the normal allocation of responsibility. Nobody consciously decided to design the organisation that way. It simply happened because the workaround worked.

    This is where highly capable people can accidentally make weak systems look strong. They absorb extra work, remember what everybody else has forgotten, resolve disputes, translate decisions, compensate for poor processes and step into gaps before those gaps become visible. Leaders see completed work and stable performance and conclude that the system is functioning. Sometimes it is. Sometimes what they are actually seeing is a weak system being protected from its own consequences by strong people. The distinction matters because the organisation may discover the truth only when one of those people stops compensating.

    The person carrying the organisation is not always an innocent victim of the arrangement either. Perfectionism, reluctance to delegate, status, habit or a genuine enjoyment of being needed can all reinforce dependency. Leaders can create the problem by repeatedly returning to the same reliable people, while capable individuals can create it by finding it difficult to let other people take responsibility. Often both forces operate at once. That is why simply telling someone to delegate rarely solves much. If they believe the standard will fall, or if the organisation continues rewarding them for personally rescuing everything, the instruction conflicts with the environment around them.

    A useful question, then, is whether capability is genuinely distributed. In a sizeable organisation, I become wary when an extraordinary amount of knowledge, influence or problem solving seems to lead back to a very small number of names. That does not make those people a problem. Quite the opposite: they may be among the organisation’s greatest assets. But an asset can also reveal a dependency. Who gets called when something goes wrong? Who knows why a process exists? What stops when somebody is away? Where do decisions bottleneck? Who can explain the work in depth, and who gives only shallow answers despite formally being responsible for it? Watching how a team actually operates can tell you more than the boxes on its structure chart.

    None of this can be discovered from a desk in a few days. Time matters. You have to get out, listen, observe, ask similar questions in different places and notice what keeps recurring. Even then, I am cautious about calling any one account the truth. Different people can experience the same organisation very differently without any of them necessarily lying or misunderstanding it. What becomes useful are the patterns that survive multiple perspectives. If the same concern, dependency or informal route keeps appearing independently, it deserves attention. Evidence accumulates.

    This is one reason I believe in going slow to go fast. A new leader can reorganise quickly. They can redraw reporting lines, formalise responsibilities, remove a workaround or decide that an influential person has too much power. Some of those decisions may eventually be right. But speed can destroy something before you understand what it was doing. The awkward workaround may be compensating for a problem nobody has yet solved. The unofficial influencer may be carrying trust that the formal organisation has failed to build. The indispensable employee may be holding knowledge that has never been transferred. Understanding these realities does not mean preserving them forever. It means knowing what you are changing before you change it.

    There is a similar danger in believing that seniority gives clarity. Authority usually broadens the view. Leaders may see budgets, strategy, confidential information and competing organisational needs that most colleagues cannot see. But breadth creates distance as well as perspective. The more of the organisation you are expected to see, the harder it becomes to see every part of it sharply. Someone much closer to the work may have a narrow view, but within that narrow field they may notice things that are invisible from above. Good judgement comes from resisting the temptation to confuse the widest view with the clearest one.

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    Perhaps that is what the organisation beneath the organisation really is. It is not a secret network waiting to be uncovered, and it is not evidence that formal structures are meaningless. It is simply the accumulation of human realities that no chart can fully represent: trust, memory, influence, habit, workarounds, expertise, relationships and the countless small acts through which people keep a place functioning. Leaders need formal structures because organisations cannot run entirely on relationships and improvisation. But leaders who see only the formal organisation will always be working with an incomplete map.

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    My early mistake with that colleague still bothers me precisely because I know better now. I allowed somebody else’s map to become mine before I had walked enough of the territory myself. Four years later I discovered that a conversation I may once have regarded as a small leadership interaction had remained with another person for years. I cannot change that beginning. I can allow it to change how I begin now.

    So when you enter an unfamiliar organisation, listen to what people tell you. Listen particularly carefully to the people others trust. Read the procedures. Study the structure. Ask who owns what. But do not stop there. Notice who people actually turn to. Notice who quietly keeps things moving. Notice which systems survive only because somebody repeatedly rescues them. And above all, resist the comfort of the first convincing explanation. The organisation you have been told about may exist. Give yourself enough time to discover the one that exists underneath it.

    If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.

  • Who Gets The Chance?

    Who Gets The Chance?

    There is a sentence I have heard several times after appointing someone: “Thank you for giving me this opportunity.” I understand why people say it. Someone has just made a decision that may change their career, perhaps significantly, and gratitude feels natural. But I tend to correct them. I did not give you the opportunity. You earned it. I may have been involved in the decision. I may have recognised something in you, argued for you or opened a door that had previously been closed. But you still had to be good enough to walk through it. That distinction matters more to me than it once did, because I know what can happen when leaders begin to believe that another person’s progress belongs partly to them.

    One of the biggest jumps in my own career came when I moved from a relatively junior position into a significant leadership role. I was competing against people with considerably more formal leadership experience, including people who were already leading teams. Some appeared, on paper at least, to be the more obvious candidates. I wanted the role enormously, but I was surprised when I got it. Looking back, I have sometimes wondered whether the person appointing me was also making a statement to the wider team by choosing the less obvious candidate. I cannot know that with certainty. What I do know is that I accepted the opportunity gladly. Whatever somebody else’s motives may have been, I still had to do something with it.

    The problem was that I immediately felt I had something to prove. I had moved quickly, bypassing some of the steps other people might reasonably have expected to come first, and some of those people were now colleagues I was expected to lead. Relationships changed overnight. People who had been alongside me, and in some cases had more leadership experience than I did, suddenly had to adjust to my new authority. I responded badly to some of that insecurity. I tried too hard to look like a leader. I sent unnecessary emails. I praised people in ways that could feel performative. I was far too concerned with demonstrating that I belonged in the role. What I needed to do was much less impressive and much more useful: listen, learn and get better.

    That experience sits behind a phrase I have used for years: don’t prove, improve. I cannot point to a single morning when I stopped trying to prove myself and became a different leader. Leadership development rarely works that neatly. At some point, I became more conscious of the shift, but it had probably been happening gradually for years. What matters to me now is the distinction. When we are trying to prove ourselves, our attention tends to turn inward. How do I look? Do they think I am capable? Have I shown enough? Improvement asks different questions. What do I not understand yet? Who knows more about this than I do? What could I do better next time? The first is concerned with legitimacy. The second is concerned with learning.

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    That is one reason I tell newly appointed people, “You’ve got nothing to prove to me.” It does not mean they have nothing to learn, or that performance no longer matters. Of course it matters. It means the selection decision has already happened. I have seen enough to believe they can do the job. I would rather they put their energy into doing it than spend part of that energy continually trying to reassure me that I was right to choose them. If I then hover, interfere, repeatedly check decisions or make them feel that every mistake reopens the question of whether they deserved the appointment, my behaviour contradicts the message. The interview has ended. The work has begun.

    There is another reason the language matters to me. I once had a leader say words to the effect of, “Remember what I did for you.” I found that deeply uncomfortable. It made me question something I had believed I had earned. Was I really the right person, or had somebody simply decided to give me a chance for reasons of their own? More importantly, the comment seemed to ask for acknowledgement of a debt: remember that part of what you have is because of me. I am perfectly comfortable giving credit where credit is due. None of us develops entirely alone. People teach us, advocate for us, challenge us and sometimes back us before everyone else can see what they see. Gratitude is healthy. Indebtedness is something different.

    A leader can open a door without owning what happens on the other side of it. That is the boundary I want to preserve. If someone I appoint goes on to become an outstanding leader, I can be pleased that I recognised their potential. I can even be proud that I played some part in their development. But their success is still theirs. They did the work, made the decisions, survived the mistakes and grew into the responsibility. Leadership becomes uncomfortable when support is converted retrospectively into ownership: I made you, I gave you your break, remember who put you there. An opportunity should not become a debt that can be collected later.

    Of course, before any of that can happen, someone has to get the opportunity in the first place. This is where leadership decisions have a compounding effect that is easy to miss. Most organisations have people who are known quantities. When an important project appears, there is someone you know will deliver. Choosing them can be entirely sensible, particularly when the consequences of failure are significant. I am not inclined to take unnecessary risks with genuinely high stakes work simply to give somebody developmental experience. But if the safest pair of hands receives every meaningful opportunity, they accumulate something beyond the work itself: experience, visibility, confidence and evidence of success. Those things make them an even safer choice next time.

    Meanwhile, somebody else may remain capable but untested. They cannot demonstrate experience they have never been allowed to gain. After enough repetitions, the difference between the two people can begin to look like a difference in ability when part of it is actually a difference in opportunity. That does not mean every overlooked person would have succeeded. Leaders should not romanticise potential or pretend everyone is ready for everything. It does mean we should occasionally examine how the people we trust became trusted in the first place. Very often, somebody once allowed them to do something before the outcome was guaranteed.

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    The answer is not to gamble with the organisation. It is to create places where growth can happen before the stakes become unforgiving. Someone might lead a smaller project, take responsibility for one part of a larger piece of work, work alongside a more experienced colleague or be given a stretch that is meaningful without being reckless. If the only opportunities available are either “nothing important” or “something we cannot afford to get wrong”, then development will always favour the already proven. Potential needs somewhere to become evidence.

    There is a cost at the other end of the equation too. The person who is always trusted can eventually pay a tax for being reliable. They become the name everyone suggests when something difficult needs doing. Another project arrives, then another problem, then another responsibility, because everybody knows they will deliver. I have seen strong people become overloaded in precisely this way, sometimes despite attempts to protect them, because reliance on them existed beyond one manager or one team. What looks like recognition from the organisation’s perspective can feel very different to the person carrying it. If opportunity always flows towards the same people, one group can be starved of development while another is quietly exhausted by being indispensable.

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    Repeatedly being overlooked has its own effect. People do not necessarily keep putting themselves forward indefinitely. Rejection is difficult, particularly when it happens several times, and eventually someone may decide that the next opportunity probably is not for them either. Organisations can then misread the behaviour they helped create: they never apply, they do not seem ambitious, perhaps they are happy where they are. Sometimes that will be true. Sometimes people have simply learned from experience that volunteering leads nowhere. Leaders need to be careful about turning reduced confidence into evidence of reduced potential.

    That does not make every rejection unfair. Sometimes someone is not ready. Sometimes several people are ready and one person simply performs better in the selection process. I rarely want to interview someone I do not believe could actually do the job, which means recruitment can involve choosing between several credible candidates. I often use a jigsaw analogy. More than one piece may fit the gap, but on this occasion one piece fits it better. The pieces that were not chosen are not therefore defective. Nor does it follow that they should automatically be steered towards the next vacancy. Encouragement can easily sound like a promise. A leader can continue believing in someone without implying that another role is theirs before a fair process has taken place.

    What matters after disappointment is honesty. If someone has potential but lacks experience, simply telling them they need more experience is not enough if nobody then creates a reasonable way for them to gain it. That becomes a closed loop: you cannot have the opportunity because you lack experience, and you cannot gain the experience because you are not given the opportunity. Where genuine potential exists, leaders should look for appropriate chances to develop it. Where someone was already good enough but another candidate was stronger, the honest message may be exactly that. Not every “no” needs to be disguised as a developmental deficit.

    Judging potential is difficult because a CV can only tell us what someone has already done. It cannot fully tell us what they might become. I tend to think relationally as well as looking at formal experience: how somebody works with others, responds to challenge, exercises judgement and behaves over time. But that creates another danger. Relational knowledge can slide very easily into familiarity or preference. “I know them” can become “I trust them”, and “I trust them” can become “give it to them again”. That is one reason I rely heavily on teams when making significant decisions, particularly recruitment decisions. Multiple perspectives do not remove bias, but they make it harder for one person’s blind spots or personal preferences to masquerade as objective judgement.

    I know I will still get some of these decisions wrong. I have almost certainly overlooked people during my career. I have probably returned to trusted colleagues too readily at times. I have also made appointments that others did not initially support. One person I appointed was not a popular choice with some colleagues, but she had performed exceptionally well in the selection process. She also challenged me and spoke her mind, qualities I valued. Over time, she stopped being “the person I had taken a chance on” and simply became a strong leader. Time had supplied the evidence. That is how trust should mature. It should gradually become less about the judgement of the person who selected you and more about the work you have done since.

    Perhaps that is the balance leaders need to hold. Opportunities matter enormously, and leaders have real power over who receives them. That power should make us thoughtful about the people we repeatedly choose, the people we repeatedly overlook and the people whose reliability we may be exploiting. But granting access to an opportunity does not grant ownership over another person’s achievement. The leader opens a door; the person still has to walk through it.

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    And once they do, perhaps the most useful thing we can offer is not another reminder that we believed in them. It is the freedom to stop auditioning for a role they already earned. There will be plenty to learn and plenty to improve. There always is. But improvement is difficult when part of your attention is permanently turned backwards, trying to prove that somebody else was right to choose you. Give people the chance where the risk is responsible. Choose them fairly. Be honest when you do not. And when they earn their place, let it belong to them.

    If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.

  • What Aren’t People Telling You?

    What Aren’t People Telling You?

    One of the strangest risks of becoming more senior is that people can become increasingly careful with you at exactly the point when you most need them not to be. Nobody announces that this is happening. There is no meeting where the team agrees to soften difficult news before it reaches you. It happens quietly. A concern is rephrased. A disagreement is saved for later. Someone decides that a detail is not worth mentioning. Another person waits to see which way the conversation is going before saying what they really think. Eventually, a leader can find themselves surrounded by intelligent, decent people and still be working with an edited version of reality. The uncomfortable part is that the leader may have helped create it without ever intending to.

    Years ago, when I was leading in Uganda, I learned something about this in a way I did not expect. My youngest son was very young at the time and, to put it politely, not always inclined to follow instructions. He had a habit of wandering off. His class teacher, a Ugandan colleague, would regularly tell me what a lovely boy he was. Then one day I found him somewhere on our large campus where he clearly should not have been. I took him back to the classroom and discovered that this was not an isolated event. He had been running off before. I remember feeling disappointed that I had not been told, both as the leader of the organisation and as his parent. I even ended up keeping him away for a couple of days, partly because his behaviour needed addressing and partly because everyone involved probably needed a break.

    With distance, however, the more interesting question is not why the teacher failed to tell me. It is why I expected telling me to have been easy. The cultural context mattered enormously. I was the senior leader. I was also white, working in a country where race, status and inherited expectations around authority could make challenging someone in my position particularly difficult. On top of that, I was the child’s father. I might have believed that I was approachable, and I certainly wanted people to be honest with me, but none of that removed the power sitting in the relationship. Looking back, I can see that an invitation to speak honestly would not automatically have outweighed everything experience and culture might have taught that colleague about speaking upwards.

    That distinction has stayed with me. Approachability and openness are not the same thing. An approachable leader may be friendly, visible and easy to talk to. People may happily stop them in a corridor, come into their office or share ordinary problems. The harder test is whether those same people believe they can bring something the leader will not enjoy hearing. That is where declarations such as ‘my door is always open’ become fairly meaningless. People do not decide what is safe by reading the slogan on the door. They watch what happens to the person who walks through it with bad news.

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    If the response is anger, defensiveness, blame or an immediate attempt to prove the messenger wrong, the lesson travels further than that single conversation. People learn. They may still talk to the leader, but the information changes on its journey. The sharp edges are removed. Context is withheld. Problems arrive later, once they are impossible to hide, or they arrive dressed as something less threatening. This does not require a particularly unpleasant leader. Most of us can become defensive when someone tells us something that exposes a mistake, challenges our judgement or contradicts what we thought was happening. I know I can be stubborn. Twenty years of leadership have not magically removed that from me. Self awareness helps, but self awareness is not the same as perfection.

    One habit I have found useful is very simple. When someone brings me something difficult, particularly when everything in me wants to respond immediately, I try to begin with thank you. I am not thanking them because I necessarily agree. I am recognising that they chose to bring the information to me. Then, if I can, I resist the temptation to settle the argument in the first few seconds. Sometimes the person will be right. Sometimes they will be wrong. Sometimes we will simply see the situation differently. Psychological safety cannot mean that every concern is validated as correct. What matters is whether disagreement with the message becomes punishment for bringing the message.

    That distinction becomes particularly important when the same challenge keeps appearing. My instinct has generally served me well over the years, but that can itself become dangerous. A history of being right can quietly become a reason to assume that you are right again. When somebody repeatedly sees something differently from me, I try to gather evidence: other perspectives, conversations, whatever objective information exists. But even that only works if the people around me are genuinely prepared to challenge me. ‘Hopefully someone will tell me if I’m wrong’ is not much of a safeguard if everyone has already learned that telling me is exhausting.

    I have deliberately tried to build teams containing people who will question me. One colleague understood particularly well that there were occasions when pressing me harder would simply make me dig in. She would make her point clearly and then leave me with it. In one case, I had been dealing with a member of staff whose personal circumstances I understood in considerable depth. That knowledge was influencing the amount of latitude I was giving them after professional problems had emerged. My colleague saw it differently. She believed the matter needed to become formal sooner than I did. At first I resisted. I thought the personal circumstances justified more patience. She did not have access to everything I knew, and some of it was not mine to share.

    But she also had something I did not have: distance. I was close enough to the person’s circumstances that compassion was beginning to interfere with my judgement about accountability. My colleague made her case and gave me time. I sat with it. Eventually I realised she was right. The interesting part was not that one of us had better information. We had different information and different vantage points. Her challenge compensated for something I had become less able to see clearly myself. That is one of the reasons disagreement can be so valuable. It is not simply opposition. Sometimes another person’s perspective is the missing piece in our own field of vision.

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    I would love to say that the lesson is to eradicate defensiveness and stubbornness, but I do not think that is realistic. Leaders are people. We will have bad moments, make poor decisions and occasionally respond less professionally than we should. The danger is when self awareness becomes an excuse: ‘Everyone knows I’m stubborn, so they know how to handle me.’ It is not somebody else’s responsibility to manage a leader’s ego. At the same time, relationships do develop their own understanding. People who know us well may recognise that our first reaction is not necessarily our final position. The important thing is that challenge still has a genuine route to influence. If people learn that disagreement can never change anything, eventually the disagreement stops arriving.

    This is not only about difficult feedback. Leaders can lose access to other people’s thinking in much more ordinary ways, particularly in meetings. Some people formulate their thoughts while they speak. Others need to listen, leave the room and think before they know what they really believe. I belong more naturally to the second group. I have sat in meetings feeling pressure to contribute before I was ready because I knew that if I waited, the quickest or most confident voices might shape the direction before my own thinking had properly formed. The problem is not that those early speakers are talking too much. Their ideas may be excellent. The problem begins when speed acquires authority.

    The first coherent contribution can easily become the reference point for everything that follows. A leader nods enthusiastically, asks interested follow-up questions or says how much they like the idea. Nothing has formally been decided, but the room has changed. The person who is still thinking is no longer contributing to a neutral discussion tomorrow; they may now feel they have to overturn today’s emerging consensus. That is why telling someone, ‘You don’t need to answer now, come back to me tomorrow,’ only matters if tomorrow genuinely remains part of the decision. Equal opportunity to speak is not necessarily equal opportunity to influence.

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    I do not think there is a perfect piece of body language that solves this. Genuine interest is genuine interest, and people will interpret it differently according to their confidence, status and history. What feels like healthy enthusiasm to one person can feel like ‘decision made’ to somebody else. The stronger safeguard is structural. If the decision does not need to be made today and you have told people that thinking time is available, then keep the decision open. Do not give people until tomorrow and quietly decide this afternoon. Otherwise the offer of time is little more than theatre.

    Silence creates another trap. It is remarkably easy to convert ‘nobody objected’ into ‘everybody agreed’. They are not the same thing. Someone may be silent because they agree, but they may also be processing, uncertain, lacking confidence, reluctant to challenge authority or simply waiting for an opportunity that never arrives. Those very different realities can look identical from the leader’s chair. I do not think the answer is to become better at interpreting silence. It is to stop treating silence as an answer and check instead. One phrase I use constantly is ‘help me understand’. Sometimes I will ask someone in the room. Sometimes I will deliberately wait and speak to them privately. The point is not to force contribution. It is to remain curious about what the absence of contribution actually means.

    There is, of course, a limit. Consultation cannot continue indefinitely. Leadership eventually requires judgement and a decision. I tend to stop when I am hearing repetition rather than genuinely new information, but only after making a purposeful effort to gather the perspectives that matter. There is a significant difference between ‘I have heard enough’ and ‘I have heard enough from the people who find it easiest to speak’. The goal is not unanimity, and it is certainly not to make every decision by committee. It is to reach the point of decision without confusing convenience, speed or apparent consensus with a complete picture.

    Even then, we will get things wrong. Looking back at my own mistakes, some happened because I did not have enough information. Others happened because the information was available and I did not give it enough weight. Those are different failures. One concerns whether reality reached the leader; the other concerns what the leader did when it arrived. We need to guard against both. But if I discovered that somebody had genuinely felt unable to tell me something important, I would find that particularly difficult. Not because it damaged my image of myself as approachable, but because it would tell me something about the relationship I had helped create.

    I hope my first response would not be, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ That question is understandable, but it quietly places the problem back with the person who stayed silent. I would rather begin somewhere else: ‘I’m sorry I’ve made you feel this way. Can you help me understand what I did, or what I failed to do, that made it difficult to tell me?’ There may be an uncomfortable answer. There may also be factors I could never completely control: culture, hierarchy, previous experiences, confidence or circumstances far beyond one relationship. But leadership gives us enough power over the environment that we cannot dismiss our part in it.

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    Perhaps that is the question senior leaders need to keep returning to. Not simply, ‘Am I approachable?’ and certainly not, ‘Why aren’t people speaking up?’ The more useful question is harder because it turns the attention back towards us: what happens around me when somebody disagrees, hesitates, arrives late with an idea, or tells me something I would rather not hear? We may never know everything people are choosing not to tell us. That is precisely why the absence of bad news should never make us too comfortable. The quality of the truth that reaches us is shaped, in part, by what people have learned will happen when they tell it.

    If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.